Tonda

Last night, we ate at Tonda in the East Village.  Tonda was one of the pizza places to sprout in the last few months marking the new-found fervor for pizza in this city.  I was very excited to try it.  The web-video was so cool, charming, alluring... Afraid of throngs of people, we arrived earlish.  Maybe it was the neverending rain or maybe it was the fact that this space is quasi-cursed, but the restaurant was pretty empty.  They even sat us (4 people) at an 8 person table.

The menu has a small selection of appetizers, street food and salad plus a fairly extensive list of pizzas. We opted for fried polenta, cauliflower salad and arugula salad as our apps, rationalizing that we'd save room for the main event: pizza.

Fried polenta came with sauteed mushrooms.  The girls liked it; the guys didn't.  It was basic, which was somehow comforting to me and my girl friend.  But to the men, it was just bland.

Cauliflower, sliced tomatoes and olives.  I liked it okay.  No one else was into it. It was, again, basic. The cauliflower was lightly pickled.

Standard. Arugula and Parmesan.  I finished this off after everyone else had lost interest.

Next came the pizzas.  We opted for the quattro formaggio, the vegetarian and the shrimp pies.

We all liked the 4cheese. But no one raved.

The shrimp pie turned out to be a sauceless mozzarella pie dotted with cherry tomatoes and arugula with two skewers of shrimp atop it.  It was less shrimp-y than I thought it would be.  We took half of it home.

The only pie we finished á table was the vegetarian pie.  It came with string beans and eggplant and zucchini.  The string beans were a first for me to experience on pizza, and, while I do not think it entirely worked, I was glad to be eating vegetables.

Overall, none of us were impressed by Tonda, but we were mildly amused.  Walking out, my girl friend remarked that it reminded her of Chicago and then we ran into a girl from our Midwestern high school.  So maybe Tonda just isn't amazing by New York standards but it's alright by normal standards.