Verdi is a tiny Italian restaurant in the Worthington Hills area. It's on old 315 just north of Hard Road, on the east side of the street. It's in the same strip mall as Hill's Market and can't easily be seen from the road. There are only seven tables in the place and they're so close together that it's hard to stand up from your seat without bumping people at the table behind you. At any given time, the buffet contains a salad station, a single pizza, a calzone, and a bowl of pasta. On busy days, the buffet often runs out of pizza, and you have to pick at your salad or pasta while you wait for a fresh pie. The place appears to have only one employee, who is definitely not Italian (we'll call him The Proprietor).
So why four spots?
Because the pizza is the best I've ever eaten at a buffet, hands down. It's a thin-crust pie you can fold up and eat New York style, cut into big triangles the way God and Tony Soprano intended, topped with fresh mozzarella and sweet, not-too-spicy pepperoni. And you'd better like pepperoni, because that's the only kind of pizza you'll find at Verdi's buffet. (Yougoddaproblemwiddat?) Quality trumps quantity: one Verdi's pepperoni pizza is better than the twelve varieties of cardboard-crust pie you'll find at Cici's. The sauce is delicious and The Proprietor thoughtfully puts out a dish of it in case you want to dip your crusts.
The calzone is as almost as good as the pizza. Great crust, fresh green peppers and onions, ham, pepperoni, and sweet Italian sausage. The Proprietor mixes that same sweet Italian sausage with his marinara sauce and penne pasta to provide the third element of the Verdi Trinity: pizza, calzone, pasta. Three discrete entities that come together in one unified Buffet. Sacre-licious.
Well, technically, there's a fourth element: salad. It seems fresh enough, especially the cheese, which is probably the same "moots-a-dell" found in the pizza. But the salad is strictly there in a supporting role, and if you eat too much of it, you're wasting valuable stomach capacity that could be better applied to pizza, pasta, and calzone.
The all-you-can-eat lunch with a Pepsi and tax is $7.74. Whether to tip at a buffet is entirely up to you, but I always do, because in addition to meeting the challenges of running a sole proprietorship, The Proprietor makes a really great pizza. Alla salute!
