Diner marks down East Boston restaurant on Yelp for being too generous with portions

And then proceeds to ask for more sauce.

Ok then.

first world problems

the type of person who expects the plate to be huge, but the food to be 1/8 the size of it and prepared by a celebrity chef. At least she kind of got the last part.

Now I know the right place to recommend for a teen sports team banquet.

pedestrian. I think of it as doing a lot of the same Sicilian- and Campanian-American standards that you see in 90% of the North End, same huge portions, though admittedly fresher and better-executed than most: clearly scratch cooking, no small differentiator. If veal parm is your jam, Rino's does an effing great veal parm, undoubtedly pounded to order (and judging from the way it overhangs a big plate, easily a pound.) Eastie was the original 19th-century Boston landing point for Italian immigrants in Boston, after all.

As I said in the first local professional review of Rino's for the Phoenix, based on a tip from a rare North End chef I admire (Taranta's Jose Duarte), the gold in the menu is in the daily specials that draw from the chef's native Abruzzo and nearby traditional Italian cuisines, like the most transporting version of Milanese veal shank on saffron risotto I've ever had in Boston. They know which pastas to make fresh, and which ones are better to source dried from a quality factory. I'm not a big lobster ravioli guy, but theirs is made by hand and stuffed with the meat of a live Maine lobster they boiled and picked that afternoon. Try finding that at some damnable North End tourist trap.

I loathe oversized portions, too, but the fact that otherwise great indies feel compelled to serve them reflects how national chains substitute volume for quality. Ask the good folks at Prezza (another rare North Ender I favor), who initially did proper traditional Italian portions: you could order an antipasto, primo, secondo, and contorno or two and feel properly fed without leftovers. I took a date there, having not been for a year or two, ordered that way, and got enough food for four. "What happened?", I asked the chef/owner. "I wanted to be traditional, but people complained about small portions." The fault is not in our restaurants, but ourselves.

Sorry I was one of those local critics (along with the brilliant Marc Hurwitz of www.hiddenboston.com) who told Guy Fieri's producers about Rino's. My heart was in the right place, but I'm afraid the ensuing DDD segment continues to account for the three-hour waits on weekends. Go at lunch and order the specials. And ignore the goddamned Yelpers the same way you would shun advice from random strangers on the street.

I know this sounds crazy... but if the servings are too big there is a very easy solution, ask for a to-go box at the beginning of the meal and have half of it packed up.