Let’s Pasta is the latest venture into both food and grammatical flexibility by the same minds that brought you Let’s Burger and Let’s Seafood. Let’s Pasta maintains the same greasy spoon format, with the same scribbled font describing the ins and outs of pasta and the same vintage shop knick-knacks throughout. The setup, in the basement of Taikoo Li South, also makes the restaurant feel oddly condensed: perhaps it’s the sense that standing up will knock over one of the too-closely-set tables. Maybe it’s the servers constantly milling about with their walkie-talkies. Or maybe it’s the suspicion that Let’s Pasta took the fast-food route.
Plenty lean towards the classics, such as the spaghetti aglio e olio, familiar lengthy pasta lightly showered with olive oil and with lacklustre tiger prawns hidden beneath the fold. Lets Pasta uses the same spaghetti for its take on the Malaysian street food mee goreng, which imparts upon the dish a drier, gruffer texture that fails to meet its potential. Blindfold usand we’d only be able to tell that the mee goreng carries itself in a slightly spicier package – our tongue could barely detect the difference between the two.
The saucier chipotle chicken fettuccine is halfway to being a taco salad: decorated with tortilla chips and sliced jalapeños, the thick strips of fettuccine are bathed in a creamy head. Buried throughout are soaked pieces of chicken, white meat that does little to really excite the senses. And one of the few non-pasta dishes, the mushroom risotto, is an all-too-mild grey gloop topped with dry chicken that’s charred supernaturally evenly, adding to the feeling that this food was made en masse, not crafted for us personally.
The only dessert is the almond tofu, which was our first and only slam-dunk. We don’t know whether it was hand-crafted or made from a powder, but it was light, smooth and soft, the delicate texture of the dessert sliding across the palate. It’s difficult to leave Let’s Pasta hungry, given that it mostly serves carbs, but it’s all too easy to leave unsatisfied.
Address: SLG53, Basement 1, Taikoo Li South, 19 Gongti Bei Lu, Chaoyang District 朝阳区工体北路19号三里屯太古里南区 B1层SLG53
Source: timeoutbeijing.com
