Restaurant Review: Guido's Pizzeria & Tapas

I finally had the opportunity to go to The Hill here in St. Louis. You may remember me referring to it recently when I was talking about the toasted ravioli. The Hill is home to the only AAA 4 diamond restaurant in Missouri, so I think that is a pretty big feat there. Besides that there were so many restaurants that looked like they would be really good and I imagine that they are considering the crowds of people flocking to and from them. To me The Hill really did feel like a close knit Italian community, like it originally was. There were all the houses with Italian restaurants, bakeries, and shops scattered throughout. Not to mention the fire hydrants painted in honor of the Italian flag.


On this particular day I ate at Guido's Pizzeria and Tapas. The restaurant was how I picture Italian restaurants to be. You can particularly tell that this one is family own and they treat you as part of the family. The service there was amazing. The menu claims to bring a little bit of Spain into the middle of Italy. The majority of the menu features traditional Italian food with another of the menu devoted to dishes from Spain, especially the famous tapas. Tapas are a type of appetizer or snack in Spain typically eaten in between lunch and dinner, since dinner is not served until sometime between 9-11pm.
Now to the most important part what did I eat...Let me begin with the fact that this was an extremely difficult choice as Italian food is one of my favorites, so everything looked remarkably good that night. I finally narrowed it down between the manicotti and lasagna and eventually chose the manicotti with marinara. The dish came out piping hot in it's own miniature baking dish and I'm not sure I can do justice to this dish with my description. The marinara had a very fresh tomatoey flavor with melted mozzarella, the manicotti shells seemed to be fresh/homemade pasta as they were thin and very tender. The filling in the shells was ricotta cheese with herbs (I'm assuming something along the lines of basil there). You can be certain that I finished my dinner on this night. I am definitely planning to go back to The Hill in the near future and mangiare.

Happy One Month to A Foodie Loves Company! :)