Carbonara Showdown

One of my absolute favorite meals of all time is carbonara. My number one favorite version of the dish is the way that my boyfriend's brother, Frank, makes it. Every couple of months I get this intense craving for it that doesn't go away until I finally coerce him into making it. (Each time I trick him into making it by saying that when I get my next paycheck I'll reimburse him for the supplies. This never happens. He keeps making it when I beg him, though.) Frank makes a heaping pot full of it. I'm unsure of the exact measurements for his recipe, but I do know a few details:

1. He uses angel hair pasta -- lots of it.
2. He uses four bell peppers, two yellow and two red, sliced and cooked in a pan with olive oil.
3. I believe he cracks four eggs into the pasta after it's been cooked. That may be the wrong number. All I know is that if he used any more or fewer eggs, it wouldn't taste the same.
4. He sometimes uses a mixture of real and fake bacon, depending on what he can find in the kitchen, and both taste great.
5. There is some garlic in there too.

Unfortunately for me, Frank recently went away to college, and so I have been without carbonara for a growing period of time. This lead me to make a rash decision at lunch today.

The time was approximately 4 p.m. My boyfriend, his brother Dominic, and their mom Lisa were going out to lunch. Olive Garden. Our wait for a table was short. Our wait for our food was great. Due to my carbonara craving, I opted for the Olive Garden version, which featured shrimp and chicken in addition to the usual ingredients. The photo on the menu looked promising, and when the plate was finally delivered to my corner of the table, the sight of the real thing had my mouth watering.

I was disappointed.

It seems that everything we had at Olive Garden for lunch today was extremely heavy -- my soup, though delicious, had the consistency of chowder and the breadsticks felt like they were sticking to the insides of my stomach. While the thickness of the soup was pleasurable, the heavy, greasy mess of carbonara was not. I found myself delivering a full-fledged comparison between Frank's carbonara and the dish in front of me to the rest of the table. Olive Garden's carbonara seemed to be loaded with some kind of sauce, which I admittedly wasn't expecting although it was clearly printed in the description on the menu. (I made the mistake of forgoing said description and choosing my meal completely on the picture and the name.) I will say one positive thing about Olive Garden's carbonara: the shrimp tasted fresh, which isn't common in chain restaurants that are not situated directly on the coast. However, the peppers looked shriveled and dead, cut into long slices; Frank always diced his peppers. There was very little bacon, and it didn't seem thoroughly cooked. The chicken was slightly fried, having been cooked with bread crumbs in oil, which only added to the weight of the meal.

Olive Garden's carbonara dish includes fresh shrimp and chicken in addition to the standard fixings for the meal. It was ultimately ruined, though, by the general heaviness in the pasta sauce. (Sorry for the camera phone picture, I neglected to bring my own camera to lunch.)

The main difference was that Frank's carbonara was so much lighter than Olive Garden's carbonara. In all my time eating Frank's version, I've never been able to see my face in it, and I've never felt as weighed down as I did after Olive Garden's dish. The latter sent me into a food coma. Even when I add a ton of cheese to Frank's recipe, I still don't feel so heavy and gross. The post-Olive Garden feeling was as if my pores were leaking that mysterious sauce that was hiding underneath my pasta.

I suppose there is a lesson to be learned from this dining experience: Always, always, always wait for Frank to come home and make his carbonara from scratch; do not settle for less than the best.