Wife and I will be in Tally this weekend for the NCSt game.
Like to go out Friday night for a nice dinner.
Staying at the Gaines street Residence inn.
Italian is always a good choice for us...like to avoid the chain ones (Carrabas, Olive Garden sort of places)
Any ideas?
Also recommendations in general anyone has, not just Italian.
thx
Gwinnett isn't too far off. We really have zero Italian places (and I've been to all of the ones mentioned, Bella Bella seems to be most popular in town but it's very bland and Ricardos was pretty bad the two times I've been well below chains) in town that are substantially better than commercial chains like Olive Garden or Carabas. I honestly will drive to Perry for the slightly above average quality of Mama's.
If you HAVE to have Italian, the best overall imo is Little Italy but there's nothing fantastic. Mom and Dad's meanwhile has a handful of dishes that I would consider 4 star out of 5 and therefore better than anything at Little Italy but you would have to stick to getting their homemade marinara and homemade meatballs with gnocchi that's pretty decent or one of their dried pastas. Other than that I would only consider Mom and Dad's rollatini as decent. The rest of their dishes are below Little Italy imo.
Now if you want Pizza there's tons of great choices like Isabella's Pizzaria Napoletana, Momo's, Gainesville Street Pies and the chains Blaze and Mellow Mushroom.
The best overall restaurants in town is Cypress and Avenue Eat and Drink with both having above average foodie food but nothing adventurous. For steak the best is the small chain Ted's Montana Grill which not only has great bison and free range grass fed beef steaks but pretty much all of their dishes are pretty good even their crabcakes, trout and other seafood dishes. Heck their bison pot roast is amazingly good.
The rest of the best I would say are mostly ethnic food like Tan's Asian Cafe for Indonesian (skip their "Chinese" and Japanese but do get the boba tea especially melon), Real Sarap for Filipino, Azu for generic Asian food and American "Chinese" food, Arepana for great arepas and even better fried yucca, La Tiendita for relatively authentic Mexican (the tongue, cabeza and crispy tripe tacos and the hibiscus Agua in particular are quite good) and Samrat for Indian are your best bets.
