Italian Let Down...

Caesar’s Den

223 South High Street

Baltimore, MD 21202

www.caesarsden.com/ 

On the Saturday evening of the weekend my girlfriend and I spent in Baltimore, I decided to take her out to a nicer dinner in Little Italy before we went out with one of my good friends from high school in Fells Point. I decided on Caesar’s Den, but after eating there I really wish I had picked somewhere else.

It’s so hard to go places based on reading reviews alone, because so much of it is subjective and biased, but I thought that I could trust this place and the reviews I read. We started off the evening with a bottle of wine, and continued with a prosciutto, peppers, and mozzarella salad, followed by a Caesar salad, chicken parmesan, black fettuccini with Arugula, and we shared pumpkin cheesecake for dessert.

The meal started off alright. The prosciutto and cheese salad was very fresh and vibrant. The olive oil was a nice accent and it enhanced the flavor of the aged meat and creamy cheese. However, after this course everything started to go down hill. The server that we had was horrible, and he was more concerned with tripping and playing footsies with his twin brother who was also a server there than paying attention to his paying customers. 

When our entrees came out, I was fairly satisfied, but how hard is it to make good chicken parm? This chicken parm was good because it was crispy underneath the sauce and the little bit of cheese that was on top of it was melted to perfection. The side pasta it came with was terrible, and the sauce that was served over the pasta tasted pretty terrible.

The black pasta with arugula was very bland. It lacked seasoning, flavor, and texture. It was a pretty bad attempt at what could have been a really good pasta dish. Plus it was lukewarm, so that never makes pasta taste very good in my opinion. 

The pumpkin cheesecake came out after a really long wait from our waiter and after he walked away before finishing his last sentence about the desserts. It was tasty and creamy, but it was pretty small, about a half the size of a regular slice. We then waited a ridiculous amount of time to get our check, as the waiter was being a dork with his brother again and not paying attention to his customers.

I was pretty upset about how bad Caesar’s Den was. It was our anniversary, and the experience was pretty terrible. I wish I had made a better decision about where we ate in Little Italy, but I guess you live and learn. What I can say is that you shouldn’t go to Caesar’s Den if you are in Little Italy. I am sure there are much better Italian places to eat. Cheers!