I tried to eat Italian food in America, I did it at Bravo! Italian Kitchen in Lansing.

From the outside it reminded me of how a restaurant looks in Italy, the inside was quite different.

Some meals on the menu were from Italy, like for the drink “San benedetto” is typical tea from Italy, and also “San Pellegrino” but here it is a grapefruit soda and in Italy it’s just water. Also an alcoholic drink there was “Aperol Spritz” that is a typical drink from Italy, it’s from the north and every Italian tries it at least one time. The starters were a mix of Italian food and American one, only one was really a Italian meat.

The pastas are quite a disappointment, there was spaghetti and meatballs, that is not a italian meals, any Italian won’t eat it and the other was from “Alfredo” and it’s not a Italian food either, in Italy it doesn’t exist. But I get why it was there because for most American people “Alfredo” is one of the most famous Italian brands so it would be weird to not have it in Italian restaurant, also mac and cheese is not Italian at all, noone has it in Italy and I was surprised to see it on the menu.

Some meats look very Italian. There were four different types of pizza: cheese, margherita, pepperoni and Sicilian. The worst one was the Sicilian with Italian sausage, pepperoni and meatballs; everything was fine but not the meatballs on the pizza; I was kinda surprised there wasn’t a pineapple pizza, in Italy if you ask to eat a pineapple pizza probably they will not even make it.

There were also some Italian meals like Lasagna, Vanilla gelato that is the ice cream, Tiramisu.

I took Spaghetti Pomodoro that is just spaghetti with tomato sauce and it cost $14, in Italy if you take just a normal pasta with tomato sauce it”s like $7 or $8 and also usually it’s not even on the menu because it’s not a “special” meat, but if you ask they will make it.

I like this restaurant, but for me it is far away from what Italian food really tastes like, but this is normal because Americans have a different view of what is really Italian food so it’s understandable, and I think it’s like this to every foreign culture, not only Italian. Even if it’s really Italian food it would taste different because there aren’t the same ingredients, even when I try to make Italian food, it doesn’t taste like what I do in Italy because of the little difference from the ingredients, some ingredients don’t even exist here. The restaurant was clean and the waitresses were nice. The service was good, we wait a little bit like 30 minutes. If this restaurant were in Italy the rating would be like 4, but it’s in America so it’s normal it is not very Italian so it’s like 6.