Review: L&B Spumoni Gardens, Brooklyn

Tonight we drove out to God Knows Where in Brooklyn (near Brighton Beach? Coney Island? Bensonhurst? Somewhere out there!) to eat at the L&B Spumoni Gardens. I have to admit....in Texas, Italian food is not a big deal. Want some pasta? You go to the Olive Garden. I have no clue how to cook my own pasta sauce and always feel unique and cook-ish when I mix in some Italian seasoning into my Newman's Own tomato sauce. Evan had been to this place before and wanted to go back, so the two of us, plus Whitney, headed out.

GUYS, the food at this place, OH MY GOD. We knew it was a good sign when we showed up and there was a ton of people out front, and all of them seemed like locals. The place has what appeared to be three different attached buildings. One was the restaurant, one a sort of take-out place, and the other was just a window for pizza and ice cream. The sassy older hostess with the huge hair told us that it would be at least an hour, so we settled down outside to wait. An hour and a half later, we got in.

We were starving, so we attacked the bread basket, and then got a big bowl of the most perfect fried calamari ever and devoured that. I got the Chicken Cacciatore, Evan got the Eggplant Parmigiana, Whitney got the Chicken Marsala, and we were all pretty pleased with our meals. We also got a square of Sicilian pizza to try, and it was super tasty as well. The portions were so big that we easily have lunch for tomorrow, and all of our entrees were reasonably priced at about $13 each. Because we'd already stuffed ourselves like fat pigs we figured, why not go for broke!, and ordered the main dish, spumoni. A spumoni? A dish of spumoni? Whatever it's called, it's this tri-colored ice cream (maybe gelato? Clueless here!) and it was divine as well. So all in all, with all that food plus two beers and a soda, the bill came to about $75, which is NOT BAD considering the amazing food that we devoured. I've eaten food in Little Italy that cost more and wasn't anywhere near as fantastic as this place. And it was definitely better than the ole Olive Garden! Afterwards we came home and I immediately went into a food coma of joy on the floor.

So yes, I'd recommend this place to anyone wanting some real Italian food without all the snotty Manhattan attitude. I have no idea how long it would take to get there by train (I'm guessing a while) but it would be worth it!

This place ranks 3.75 stars out of 4. The reason I docked .25 is because Whitney asked repeatedly for a glass of water that never came, and some of the wording on the menu was a bit ambiguous.

L&B Spumoni Gardens
2725 86th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11223
718.449.6921

http://www.spumonigardens.com/

This is how we felt after eating there: