Noodle-icious

WHETHER they’re long, white noodles with rich meat sauce or short, orange noodles with slices of hotdogs the size of 25-centavo coins, most people consider spaghetti as comfort food. With the opening of The Old Spaghetti House, spaghetti lovers can discover the many different variations of this all-time favorite.

Located at the upper ground level of SM Cebu, in between a popular bakeshop and a chicken restaurant, The Old Spaghetti House, or Tosh for short, offers a wide selection of spaghetti-based dishes. While they do serve other kinds of pasta, rice dishes (like the delicious salpicao with garlic rice), kiddie meals, combo meals and desserts (like their mud pie and colossal chocolate chip cookie a la mode), it’s the spaghetti that will make you come back for more.

The classic spaghetti Bolognese at Tosh should please most spaghetti lovers, with its flavorful meat sauce seasoned with herbs and spices, while the restaurant’s kiddie spaghetti is the way a lot of kids (and even adults!) like it: slightly sweet and distinctively Pinoy-style. And it’s not all red-sauced spaghetti that’s available at Tosh.

The restaurant’s chicken and mushroom spaghetti is a good introduction to the more sophisticated versions of the dish. The basic sauce is creamy and garlicky at the same time, and its flavor is complemented by the slivers of chicken and mushroom that make up the body of the sauce.

Those who are looking for more than just spaghetti should definitely try the pepper-crusted fish with spaghettini. The white dory fillets are covered with a light, peppery crust and are a delight to eat. The spaghettini, which are slightly smaller than the regular spaghetti noodles, are tossed with a tasty, garlicky basil, tomato and oil-based sauce. Customers won’t go wrong in ordering this particular dish.

Another pasta and chicken dish that’s worthy of mention is the golden-crusted chicken crepe served with angel hair pasta. The chicken crepe greatly resembles a chicken cordon bleu, although instead of just breading, the chicken, ham and cheese are wrapped in a crepe then deep-fried. The angel hair pasta, looking much like sotanghon noodles except they’re a bit bigger in diameter, is slathered with a pretty good pomodoro sauce. Made from tomatoes, olive oil and basil, the pasta pomodoro is a good choice for the health-conscious.

The present economic crisis notwithstanding, most of us still would want to eat out, whether it’s to celebrate a special occasion or just to cheer ourselves up with some comfort food. Still, most of us would want to eat at a place where we can get a lot of bang for our buck. This is the norm at The Old Spaghetti House: good food at reasonable prices.

What a comfort!