These are my thoughts on the new Aldo's Cafe, which was formerly Aldo's Italian \r
Restaurant in Tucker, Georgia.\r
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First, to be fair, the good news. The entrees were actually good to very good. I had the Alballo Polo, which is a (supposedly) Persian dish of a chicken kabob (minus the stick) on a bed of yellow rice with sweet and sour cherries along with a half order of mixed vegetables. My companion had the veal parmigiana. My chicken vegetable soup had a bit of bone or gristle in it and didn't have much taste for what, the waitress said, was homemade soup. The salads were the typical Aldo's salads: a sliver each of tomato, beet, onion and a few chickpeas all drowning in a vegetable oil based dressing. The rolls were a bit too hard. Typical things from Aldo's. Mediocre bread and salads, no change.\r
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Now the bad news. Aldo's Italian Restaurant had what was probably the nicest atmosphere of any place in Tucker. That was always really the main reason to go there, that and the proximity. It was never for the food. Not so now. It's located in a dying shopping center and the story I got from my waitress was that the new down scaled version was the result of a compromise between the owner of the shopping center and the owner of Aldo's. The rent was going up so the owner decided that the square footage of the place would have to go down.\r
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From outside you walk directly into the restaurant (I wouldn't want to be the first couple of tables near the front door.) into what was the old bar of the place. The old dining room in now completely gone and the new dining room is a combination of the bar (With the old bar still in place.) and what had been the private dining room. The place is very noisy and they have added several large flat screen televisions in each corner, which gives it more of a pub-like and less of a fine dining feel. Music was from a radio or something similar.\r
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Service was mediocre to rude. The waitress hovered around the table only when it came time to remove dishes, once even before we were finished eating.\r
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Sadly, I cannot recommend this place and I think that what was a last-ditch effort to save it is not going to work. If you want good Italian food go to Dominick's in Old Norcross. In the meantime, we in Tucker will just have to hope that a really good and authentic Italian restaurant will open here.
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