Restaurant Review: Vapiano at Mockingbird Station in Dallas

by The Law Reviewers of The Law Reviewers

DALLAS — Everyone wants to know what the restaurant of the future will look like. Will it be a George Jetson-style sky diner? A Star Trek replicator-rama? A Soylent Green emporium (Mmmmm, Soylent micro-greens with soylent shitake aioli vinaigrette)?

Well, Vapiano, a newly-opened, German-owned Italian fast-casual restaurant wants to provide the answer. This was all explained to us in a call we received from Vapiano's PR representative, a sultry Italian, who called us from jail to discuss her German boyfriend Smirk Berenski, who manages the restaurant chain.

"I just want to set the record straight, that while Vapiano serves fresh casual Italian food like fire-roasted pizzas, house-made pastas, hand-tossed salads, and other-hyphenated delicacies in a hip atmosphere," she sniffed over the phone, "the ordering process is pure German efficiency and the décor is German minimalist. Also, I'm not pregnant, I just ate some raw pizza dough and the yeast is expanding in my stomach." We’re still not sure why she decided to over-share like that since we told her we weren’t with the Dallas Morning News.

So, what is the secret technology that Vapiano has developed that will lead all restaurants into the Minority Report-like future? Upon entering the restaurant, we were greeted by a hostess at the front counter, where she gave us a "credit card" for us to use to place our food order and then pay when we left. As Keanu Reeves would say, "Whoa!" The hostess then directed us to several lines marked either pizza or pasta where we could place our order for the corresponding dish with said "credit card".

As we decided which line/entrée to choose, we took in the atmosphere – the vibe is definitely Euro-minimalist with a bright and airy feel in the dining area. All of the furniture is composed of very light wood and there are lots of small plants lining the room that either serve as the restaurant's herb garden or its Amsterdam-style coffeeshops. On the other side of the hostess desk is the bar area with lots of small, stark red chairs and straight-lined furniture that make you feel like you’ve wondered onto the set of the failed Sprockets movie (No "Touch my monkey joke"? Are the Law Reviewers growing up?)

Finally, the time to determine our destiny had come. One of us and another dining companion stepped into the pizza queue (that’s European for "line," which is funny since the concept of lines doesn’t exist to most non-German Europeans), and the other made the fateful decision to have pasta. Pizza-line guys placed their orders and were sitting down awaiting freshly baked pizzas in minutes. The pasta-line compadre waited at least twice as long to order his pasta from the pasta technician behind the counter.

The set up for the pasta stations was a lot like the omelet station at a hotel or the pasta station at a bar mitzvah. You tell the server what pasta dish you want, she places the ingredients for the pasta in a large skillet in a concave heating contraption and then plays 20 questions regarding any additional ingredients or side items: Garlic? Thai chile peppers? Side salad? Long distance savings? This got annoying since she never mentioned what the cost would be for these add-ons, although we were interested in long distance savings, very interested. You just have to swipe your "credit card" and hope everything will turn out okay.

The menu lists a wide variety of pasta dishes organized into categories like "traditional" and "classic". What’s the difference between traditional and classic, you ask? Apparently, $1.00 since all the traditional entrees were $7.95 and all the classic dishes were $8.95. Pasta-guy opted to splurge on the granchi de fiume ($10.95), which fell into the premium or priciest category, with tagliatelle pasta. The pasta tasted like it was freshly prepared in-house and it was; we could see the pasta maker toiling away in his little glass cell right behind the hostess desk. The tagliatelle was served in a creamy lobster sauce with crawfish and julienned vegetables. The sauce was a little heavy and greasy, but the crawfish and the vegetables worked well with the fresh pasta.

Pizzas were in the very good category, with a crust that aims to please everyone – not too thin, not too thick, not too much oil. The Salciccia ($9.95) was topped with slightly spicy pepperoni and cabbage. Strange to see cabbage on a pizza, but it worked; the oven takes most of the bitterness from its taste but leaves in a crunch that you usually don’t experience with pizza. The chicken pesto pizza was obviously a lot more oily than a "typical" pizza, but if you can get past that, the pesto was certainly fresh (possibly from the in-house garden? Who knows, what are we, journalists?) and complimented the tender chicken bits.

Side salads were in the "meh" category, ours with a forgettable cream-based house dressing. Dried seasonings for the pizza were in large communal tea cups on top of the pizza counter – no thanks, if we're going to catch a fellow-diner's germs, it’s going to be because we ate their leftover pizza crusts after they pay and leave, not from some communal seasoning bowl.

Desserts are apparently provided by a roving dessert-tray-server, who fills a role startlingly similar to the $1 jello "shot girls" of South Padre yesteryear. We say apparently because our lawyerly images must have frightened her (you know, the whole lack of a reflection thing), and after serving a few nearby tables, we never saw her again until checkout. At checkout, she magically reappeared and then promptly froze when one of our cards registered a completely different food order than what we'd eaten. Eventually, the hostess returned to straighten things out. The whole experience reminded us that sometimes the future isn't now.

Vapiano has decent food, but it needs to work the kinks out of its pseudo-modern service system and stop relying on its Euro-modern chic atmosphere to draw people in. On our Euro-backpacking gavel scale, where five gavels is unlimited free beer at the end of the Heineken brewery tour and one gavel is the 60-bed, renovated-dance-studio hostel in Prague with cold showers, we give Vapiano two and three-quarters gavels or the slightly satisfying experience of receiving a free tour of the Uffizi Gallery by eavesdropping on a Canadian seniors' tour group.

P.S. And don’t forget to visit our re-vamped Law Reviewers Web site, where you can check out all of our past reviews, read our blog posts about dining in Big D and much, much, much more. It’s hyper-linking good, y’all!

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