Ottawa Foodies

Consistency is Pub Italia's biggest issue, imo. Consistency between the care they observe in beer (and wine) vs. the emphasis on food. And consistency from one night to the other.

I've had great meals one night (last night's goat cheese & pine nut salad was excellent!), other nights less so. alas, the beer beckons weak souls back.

Maybe PI should flirt with the idea of allowing customers to bring food in from neighbouring restaurants (ala the Elmdale)?

While the beer selection here is fantastic, the pasta is found to be very lacking. The noodles are often overcooked and the sauces are boring and mildly tasteless. The pizzas, like stated before have a very thin crust, almost too thin. I guess it's either love/hate with them, and I cannot say I love them. Beer = good, food = go somewhere else on Preston.

I don't even like beer, but I love this place.

They have a good selection of wine (with my favourite wine available by the glass!), specialty coffees, good food and a nice ambiance.

We often go here with friends as I drink cappuccinos all night and can be the designated driver for all the beer-drinkers. Each beer (and the beer bible!) is a conversation piece!

My friends took me here yesterday and I am in love.
The beer bible is the best thing in Ottawa.
I agree with the lack of interact payment though. To be honest, I normally pay with Visa or Cash anyways, but whats the harm in getting interact? Also, maybe it's just me being blind, but the sign of no-interact is posted on the back of the main door, so you don't really see it unless you're walking back from the bathroom.
The service is good, and the staff know their beers. Its a great place to go and pick and choose beers for yourself and others.

We came here for a small OttawaFoodies get together and had a great time in the very cozy and pleasant "Abbey" room. The Abbey is a quieter off-shoot from the main Pub Italia room and is worth visiting for its décor and atmosphere.

Service, courtesy of Bronwyn, was most friendly and well-informed on both topics of food and drink.

Beer selection and quality was excellent. Food was all right but really it's about the beer. See my comments under Beer and Pizza for more.

Yesterday the family picked me up at work and I suggest to my wife that we go out for dinner. On the way back to the hood we came to an agreement on Pub Italia - a decision we both came to regret.

Admittedly much of what went wrong was due to the waitress and not the establishment, but not all of it. I believe she was very new at the whole waitressing thing.

We started out with having a full glass of lemonaid dumped into my wife's lap. Almost. If my wife hadn't seen it coming and moved out of the way it would have landed right in her lap. As it stood she still got a significant amount of it on the outside of her thigh. As we agreed afterwards, when something like this happens it's up to the waitress to really go out of her way for the rest of the meal to ensure everything is more than perfect. She took the opposite approach and avoided us as much as possible. I can understand her being embarrassed and not wanting to face us, but suck it up! Especially when we were very forgiving and took a "stuff happens" attitude toward it.

The buns that came before the meal were very good, even my oldest son agreed. The brushetta topping was absolutely delicious, but the bread they served it on seems to have gone downhill a bit from what I recall. Still not bad overall though. Mine and my sons' thin crust pizza were good - maybe 4 out of 5. My wife said her veal sandwich was mixed. The sauce was apparantly fantastic, but the veal was like shoe leather and the bun it was served on "so-so" at best. And her salad was extremely good.

When it came time to pay I was informed they dont' have Interac but there was a bank machine on-site. I didn't bother checking it but I'm sure it would have dinged me a charge for using it so I paid with credit card. Sorry, but this is something I just can't tolerate - that's what strip clubs do, not good restaurants. These guys are certainly already making money hand over fist and they don't need to be nickle-and-diming their customers like this. Boo Pub Italia!

See my comments in the beer section as well.

In short, it will be some time before we go back here for dinner again. And I am herewith removing myself from "Fans of Pub Italia" on this site. I may go back for a beer, of course.

I had the most girliest beer on the planet from here the other day.
It was a belgian beer called a Fruli. Its made from strawberries. REALLY good. This is a good beer for anyone who likes the coolers and "girly" drinks of the world.
I can't believe their selection either.
I want to try every beer on the list.

I don't have much to add to the comments already made here. Yes it is a beer haven, especially if you like Belgian beers. If you are looking for good Italian food then you it fails miserably. You can make it at better at home with out much effort.

So go for the beer and eat somewhere else.

My favourite beers are all red, so I was eager to try the exclusive-to-Pub-Italia Satan's Red. Our kind server offered to give me a little taste, warning me that some people like it and some don't. I quite liked it but didn't love it so I decided to try something else -- Der Koninck. It was really very nice and worth having again!

After Der Koninck, I went for a pint of something I really love -- Kilkenny. It was poured perfectly, with a beautiful 3/4" head of creamy foam. Ahhhh!

I love reading through their Beer Bible and picking out something new when I visit. Great little watering hole with a cool decor and vibe. Try your beer with a side calamari and zucchini sticks.

The beer selection here is nothing short of fantastic, as always. I started out the evening with a Beau's All Natural, then a Hacker-Pschorr Munich Lager, and finally an Erdinger Hefeweizen.

Pet peeve time - Hefeweizen is adamantly not served with a wedge of lemon! Grrr. It's close cousin Krystalweizen often is, but Hefeweizen never! And when I went to remove mine I accidentally knocked it into the glass so it did end up flavouring my beer a bit. Normally not a big deal but given the bad experience we were having here last night (see my other comment) this was just adding insult to injury.

This is one of my favourite places to find some delicious beers.

26 beers on tap and over 100 more in the bottle - what's not to like?!! Ok, my wife reading over my shoulder right now says "What's not to like - they have no accommodation for kids - no booster seats or anything". OK, aside from that what's not to like?

As for the food, I've only ever had the pizza and find it to be extremely good thin-crust pizza.

It *is* all about the beer and the decor when visiting this establishment. The food isn't anything memorable, in fact I've had a couple of below average pasta dishes on two different occasions...but that being said I find that the pizza is a pretty safe order, and the calamari is OK.

Their sister establishment next door "The Abbey" has a phenomenal menu of trappist beer (beer brewed by trappist monks). My boyfriend and I enjoy a visit and treating ourselves to new kinds of beer every now and again. This opened my eyes wide to the staggering varieties of beer the world has to offer.

Fun place to take a group. Oh, and Pub Italia has a great flavored olive oil that they make themselves.

Nice place on Preston Street where I can drink international beers without stress. Tasty burgers

Agreed that they have a staggering selection of beer. Even better is the fact that the choices come from countries all over the world, and that they stock not only beers that the staff enjoy, but ones they fully admit they do not! Reading the tasting notes is almost as fun as drinking the beer. Almost.

As mentioned by others, the pizza has an extremely thin (maybe 2 or 3 millimeter) crust. I opted for the "Funghi" pizza. Topped with mushrooms, delightful pancetta, mozzarella and parmesan cheeses, it was truly tasty. Our server had recommended this particular pizza and accurately suggested that a drizzle of chili oil would make it awesome.

The pizze at Pub Italia are 10 inches in diameter and they offer whole or half sized ones. The crust is so thin though that it eats like a cracker, meaning you will go hungry if you get a half pizza.

Anyways, maybe not the best pizza in the world but great with beer! :-)

A friend and I split a pesto-mushroom pizza here once and it was tasty - although I probably would have thought *anything* tasted great after all the beers we had sampled.

We ordered 2 of the thin crust pizzas last Friday and were generally pleased with both of them - 4 out of 5 on both counts. In fact the thin crust pizza has been something I've always enjoyed very much here, and I believe it's as good as ever. We were there on a busy Friday and the pizza was still hot. I believe Food Is Hot's comment on "too salty" is because of the proscuitto - I've had a lot of that stuff from various places that is REALLY salty. Our pizzas certainly were not salty.

The pizza is good, but be wary of going on a busy Friday afternoon: I ordered a pizza and it was stone-cold when it got to me.

I found thier pizza WAY too salty. Virtualy inedibly so. The one I tried was the one with procuitto on it - can't remember the exact topping. Perhaps something without a cured meat would be less salty and more appealing.

This was...different.

The standard margherita came with a lot of freshly chopped tomatoes. Pro: fresh. Con: supermarket cardboard variety, not nice plum ones.

The crust is bizarre. It's quite thin, crisp, and crackerlike. It seems to be something ready-made; it had a very 'processed' aspect to it. The edges were very dry, to the point of being more cracker than crust.

But, cheap for a half-pizza; quite good with beer.

Warm, with tomatoes and, oddly, lightly fried potatoes, which works very well. Great healthy comfort food.

The voodoo meatballs are a delicious appetizer or ask them to toss in some pasta and have a great meal.