Via Cibo

Date: September 29, 2013
Location: 808 York Mills Rd #14 (east of Leslie), midtown Toronto
Website: http://www.viacibo.com/
Cuisine: Italian street food
Meal: dinner

My thoughts:
I came here with my fellow Triple D friends (inside joke) - AB and her husband, and AE - to celebrate AE's birthday.

AE had been raving about this place for awhile and I was very excited to try it out. He said that the owner used to own Subway and another major food chain (he thinks it may be Mucho Burrito), sold them and opened this. This is an "Italian street food" joint, so everything is very reasonably priced and for the most part self-serve. 

With a steely grey walls and red accents, the décor is definitely very modern and inviting. It seemed to be the highlight of my whole experience here, though. The ordering procedure was somewhat confusing and the fact that there isn't a host at the doorway to explain it seems to imply this place is catered to regulars. Anyway, you place your order near the front of the restaurant, are given a number (one number for your entire party if you're coming with others), and as you walk over to the back of the restaurant, the restaurant's computers sync up and you pay for your order at the cash without having to tell tell the cash what you ordered. Neat albeit confusing to one who's never gone through the whole sh'bang.

And then the food. Disaster would be putting it mildly. I had the Calabrese Sausage Piadina ($8.99), which was a flat bread wrap with Italian Sausage, roasted peppers, onions, pomodoro Sauce, provolone and chilli aioli. While the description may sound harmless enough, the offence lay in the fact that there was so much grease in my wrap that within 10 minutes, there was a large pool of it on my plate, in which the half of my wrap was soaking in. It was disgusting! Needless to say, the sight of that alone made me lose my appetite (a hard feat to achieve) and I didn't eat that second half - and I hate wasting food.

My friends didn't seem to have that problem. I didn't try their food, but they seemed to enjoy it. Based on my experience, I'm not willing to try this restaurant again and risk having to waste so much food again.