Cafe Prego

Mixed feelings about Café Prego.
The food is good, hot, predictable and comfortable. It tastes exactly the same every time we go and if I’m too lazy to make Chicken Parm at home, I know it’ll taste right at Café Prego.
But.
We have had 3 failed attempts at going. Although the website says «Open 7 days a week,» they most certainly are not. We went on a Sunday evening — not open. Tuesday night around 8:30 — not open. One Thursday evening we went at 9pm and they were closing up.
In fairness, the owner/​manager offered to stay open for us, however with the disgruntled attitude we’d experienced from the waitstaff on prior visits, we didn’t want spittle in our food so we opted for Mirko nearby.
Also, I understand them wanting to cram as many diners in there as possible to maximize revenue, but sitting in the corner near the window on top of two other tables leaves something to be desired.
With that said, though, we do enjoy the food and small Italian feel. Regardless of its setbacks, we do still occasionally answer the question of «I’m in the mood for pasta, where should we go?» with «Café Prego is right down the street.»

I’ve driven past this restaurant dozens of times since moving to Buckhead 6 months ago, but never gave it a try until tonight.
I should have kept on driving.
The place is small and quaint, and that’s about all it has going for it. The bread served before the meal had been pre-​sliced and heated in the oven which dried it out.
I ordered Veal Saltimbucco which was tough and stringy, and covered in a thick layer of melted mozzarella that killed any potential flavor. The side of spaghetti with marinara was a better dish.
I saw my waiter twice — once when he took my order and second when he brought my beverage. He never checked in to see how I liked the meal or to offer any sort of beverage refill. I had to flag down whom I guess was the owner to get my check.
The food wasn’t horrible, but mediocre at best. I had been hoping to find a neighborhood «go-​to» Italian restaurant, but I’ll have to keep looking.

According to my parents, this place used to be the jam and I can see how that was once possible. But now, well, eh.
5 stars for the ambiance. It’s teeny tiny, it’s full of crap, and the waiters are legit old school Italian folk with thick accents and suspenders. They have a CD player (oh yeah) and played Sixteen Candles (by the Crests, not Molly Ringwald style) over the speakers when they found out it was a diner’s birthday. They offered us limoncello on the house at the end of the night and despite the crackled menus and offbeat appearance, it’s all quite charming.
The food, however, is where the place suffers. The bread was stale and the butter was served in little packets a la high school cafeteria. My mussels were bland and the chicken dish I ordered (I forget the name but it had artichoke hearts and some sort of cream/​wine sauce) was a solid mediocre. Nail in the coffin when the waiter went to go retrieve some «fresh parmesan» for our dishes and returned with a Pizza Hut-​style shaker full of what I’m pretty sure was the grated Kraft stuff. My mom’s eggplant parmigiana looked pretty spectacular, though, and she seemed happy with it… so maybe that’s the way to go. Still, I think a better place to go is pretty much any Italian restaurant in the surrounding area. If this place were crazy cheap, maybe. But it’s not, so…
#yelp365 ²¹⁄₃₆₅

Good option for neighborhood Italian food. The service is very attentive and they have a full bar. The menu has a few adventurous dishes but I recommended you stay with the basics. Fresh food for a fair price.

This is perhaps the worst Italian restaurant I have ever tried. All the elements are in place to fool you though: they have waiters with accents and tux shirts, they have chianti, they even have faux brick on the walls. But it goes straight down hill from there. Italian cuisine and Italian-​American cuisine is based on the simple concept of quality seasonal ingredients paired with simple techniques. Our meal started with a bread basket of frozen «Italain Bread» heated up just enough to ward off its chill with a side dish of margerine slices. We asked for olive oil, but was given a shaker of salad oil (soybean). It gets worse: my companion ordered mussels in white wine sauce. The dish arrived to the table with the most rancid and foul odor this side of the Chattahoochie at low tide. They were obviously spoiled days before cooking. My dinner special of essentially veal parmesan with eggplant on top was a bland and greasy mess. Thr eggplant was so far cooked it actually turned gray. At $ 24.95 I felt literally violated. Other dishes my friends tried were equally horrific. Don’t even get me started on the pickeled-​canned asparagus my meal came with. Even the red sauce here tasted worse than my grade school cafeteria’s version. I could go on, but I am still in shock as to how this place remains in business. I suspect the blue-​blood Southern folk who live in this neighborhood simply don’t know any better… but no one can be that clueless.

Best Bolognese Sauce anywhere within the 10 mile radius of the place — possibily within a 100.
Small place, though (it’s in a mini-​mall a few doors down from Publix — if you don’t look for it, you’ll miss it). Have a nice romantic ambiance — at least it seems to me (I don’t have a girlfriend, so I feel sort of out of place there).
Highly recommended.