Hey Mambo is a super fun Italian restaurant downtown. I know both the executive chef, Nicole Brooks and her son and I decided to go here one night with a friend. As I just mentioned, I know people involved with this restaurant. I am going to try to not be bias at all but I wanted to disclose that. I do want to mention that Hey Mambo also has pizza. I'm not going to review it here because I try to only review one experience but I will say that it's worth trying.
When I went, it was pretty busy. I was very lucky when my friend and I got a seat outside. Let me say, sitting on the patio at Hey Mambo is really fun; I especially enjoyed watching the downtown bustle going on around the restaurant. Nicole comes over and winds up serving us pretty much the whole night. I could tell it was busy and that they were slammed. It's wonderful that the executive chef is willing to do anything to help but I feel like there should have been enough servers so that she didn't have to. Anyways, me and my friend ordered a wedge salad, ravioli all'arrabbiata, chicken scallopini and the vino pasticcino.
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| The Bread stick that comes with the meal is as long as my boot! |
When you go to Hey Mambo, you get these bread sticks. They are long, crunchy and well seasoned. They are definitely different but I sure do like them. They are more on the dry side (which I like) so don't be surprised and think it will be squishy like bread!
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| The Wedge Salad |
This wedge salad is really really good. It was soffritto (a seasoned, cooked veggie mix), bacon bits and a homemade giardino dressing. It's creamy, rich, smokey, well balanced and so very good. I was licking up my dressing. Oh man it was a good start to the meal!
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| The scallopini |
My scallopini was pretty good. It has an artichoke lemon caper cream sauce which was tasty but I wish that it had been just a tad bit more acidic. We were given a side of their spicy sauce. I put just a smidge of that in and it definitely helped balance the sauce out a little. Other than that, the chicken was well cooked and flavorful and went great with the sauce. I would order this again.
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| The ravioli |
My friend's ravioli was great. It was hearty, spicy and cheesy. The sausage that was in this dish was just killer. My friend also added more of the spicy sauce but not because there was anything wrong with this dish.
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| Our wine cake |
The wine cake was the only part of our meal that we weren't super thrilled with (sorry Nicole). We both felt that it tasted like store bought cake that was just a little bitter and we were not sure if we liked that.
Once our meal was done, it had settled down a bit and Nicole said goodbye and left us in the hands of the actual servers to pay. I am not sure if it was because they weren't sure who was actually our server but it took them a really long time to get our check taken care of and they seemed confused about the entire thing. One time that I was here had amazing service but one time I was here our server was so bad that our table wound up asking Nicole if we could have a different one. So, you can sometimes get spotty service here although Nicole always tries to help out when she can.
Overall we had a wonderful meal. I will definitely go back to Hey Mambo. It has a modern, fun atmosphere and the food is solid. I especially love sitting outside on a nice day. So, if you are ever in the downtown area looking for a new place to try, I think Hey Mambo should be considered.
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