Que Pasa, which turned into Sette

I tried to go to Que Pasa (25th and M) last Friday night. I was all excited because I had never been, and had been thinking about it all day. When we arrived, all the tables in the place (like, all 10 of them) were arranged in a huge L shape with one huge party, balloons and all, and music equipment was setup in a corner. We were surprised to see this, but undaunted, we walked over to the mostly empty and large bar. I couldn't help but think the 3 huge armchairs and coffee table in the middle of the room were not the best use of space, especially when they obviously had customers who wanted to eat. I love cozy seating at a coffee shop, but I didn't think that was what this place was going for.

Turns out, it was their 1 year anniversary, and the party of 20 or so hogging all the tables had eaten up all the Ropa Vieja and plantains and those were the major 2 reasons I came. This was at 7 pm. I was disappointed in the restaurant's inventory planning. We left and decided to try again another night.

So we popped around the corner to Sette (23rd and Main) which is a great standby of mine, but I handn't been in awhile. I love the sleek, industrial interior, the fact that hardly anyone seems to know about it, and the huge, affordable brick-oven pizza. I hate that no one seems to be able to decide how to pronounce the place though.

My date had the Little Italy pizza: red sauce, spinach, chicken, mozz, goat cheese. I had the Greek pizza, by request, without garlic. It was flavorful and the crust was crispy, I just felt like it seemed to be missing something, perhaps the lack of freshness of the roma tomato. That and the crust handle portion made up a larger portion of the pizza than it should have.

I thought my pizza was Waay more flavorful than my date's, but he enjoyed it. Pizzas are from $8-11. We split a bottle of Ruffino Italian Chianti, about $27 which we both enjoyed. The waiter was very friendly and even though one of our pizzas apparently didn't make it from the oven to the plate on the first try, which made our wait longer, we didn't mind--we were enjoying our wine.

My pet peeve with lots of Richmond restaurants is this: Servers need to know SOMETHING about the wine list. Especially if you are an establishment that has a decent list, and is NOT serving fast or low-end food. My server at Avenue 805 a few weeks ago, and at Sette knew NOTHING about the wine, and that was really frustrating.

http://www.settepizza.com/
http://chpn.net/news/tag/que-pasa/  (Que Pasa doesn't have a website)