It’s funny. I came all the way to Basel to work with one of my customers. There were 4 people I was working with, and not one of them was Swiss! we had a Brit, a German, a Croatian, and a Brazilian, but not one Swiss. After meeting up with my Brazilian colleague, we set off to find some food for dinner. While I was walking around some more in Basel, I had come upon this cool looking rock-n-roll type place on a little side street up a hill. We tried this place first and we couldn’t eat there because they were having a special event in the dining room upstairs. The only place we could hang out was the bar area and that was full and packed. So we moved on. It was my colleague’s turn next so we walked a little bit to another cool looking spot. We weren’t sure if they served food or not, so we asked. Although they did have a food menu, it was really just appetizers or steak. We really weren’t in the mood for either. So we tried again! We went next door to another place and they told us they had just closed the kitchen. Dammit. Were we going to get to eat tonight? The lady who had just rejected us kindly told us that the pizza place across the street would still have food. So we said ok, because honestly, we simply couldn’t take any more of this food rejection!

This is how we ended up at Centro. When we got there, the place was positively packed! And this made sense to me because even though there are so many other restaurants in Basel, apparently, it’s quite a challenge to actually eat in any of them! Centro is an italian joint. They have pizza and pasta and other italian fare. When we first looked at the menu, it was really hard to figure out what was going on. The dishes were named in italian and they were described in swiss german. Although it’s fine for me to figure out that lasagne is lasagne and that penne is penne, it was what was on them / in them that was hard to figure out from the swiss german. Eventually, I got an english menu and was finally good to go!I ordered the penne centro, which was penne with chicken and pepperoni in a creamy tomato sauce. It took forever for our food to come out. And we were both so damn hungry at this point. But it was totally worth the wait. I loved this dish! The sauce was perfect and although there wasn’t that much chicken, what chicken there was was perfect. I ate the whole thing. As in I cleaned the plate. Yes, I stuffed myself silly. And if there had been more, I would have eaten more, as it was an amazing pasta dish. I don’t actually recall pepperoni being in this, but I didn’t care. And it looks like a hot damn mess in this plate, but trust me, it was damn good. If I’m ever in Basel again, I would get this again!

With the weather continuing with its swelter, my body continued to crave cold foods. I had a bunch of veggies handy and this bag of radiatore that needed to be used, so I whipped up a quick pasta salad. I love me some radiatore. Whenever I’ve had saladworks, I always have them put tons of their pasta in there, and it happens to be radiatore. There’s just something about its shape that I dig. And this is a very difficult pasta shape to find in regular grocery stores. Believe me, I tried. But then I found this multi-colored one from trader joe’s. Score. This just turned out to be one hell of a colorful pasta salad. With yellow pepper, cucumber, red onion, tomatoes, the vegetable radiatore, and the mozzarella, it was all the damn colors of the rainbow. I had a bottle of vinaigrette that was nearing its expiration date, so I just threw that in there as the dressing. It was just what I wanted.

In addition to my strawberry daiquiri and some beers, we ended up having a couple of Sidecars. The waitress and the bartender didn’t really know what they were, and in reality, neither did any of us. But with the trusty aid of the interwebs, we had the bartender whip up some cognac based Sidecars. The priest-to-be who wanted the Sidecars in the first place, said this was a man’s drink. And then when we got them, they were served in these girly glasses. So perhaps its man-ness needs to be reconsidered. But damn, this was a fine drink. And at the Spaghetti Warehouse no less. The service was good. Our waitress was friendly and she appreciated that we weren’t using a coupon. We’re probably not the typical crowd here, so she seemed to enjoy us. There is a high percentage of coupon using clientele here. Sitting in the trolley car was pretty cool though. We also saw a little old lady fall over while we were eating. She caused quite the commotion, but ended up being ok. I still can’t believe I ate at the Spaghetti Warehouse. Sure, you get tons of food for the price (and who can knock value these days), but I’m going to go back to avoiding this place again. Because it was what I expected!