Lucca for Lunch: Food, Folks and Frozen Ass Cheeks

(NOTE: Before I sat down to write this little blurb, I did a quick peek at what some other folks had to say about Lucca online. To my amazement, my eating experience turned out to be eerily similar to the experience of the News and Review’s Liz Kellar some three years ago.) Having recommended Lucca to my coworkers as a festive and rewarding eatery at which to have our Christmas luncheon, I was sorely embarrassed by the poor accommodations, suspect service and lackluster food. (To be truthful, I wasn’t that embarrassed, at least not nearly as embarrassed as I was when that tape recorder fell out of my jacket at that Doobie Brothers concert exposing me as an illegal bootlegger. Man, was my face red, almost as red as my beret.)

So, trying to impress the folks at the office, I got us a reservation for lunch, not realizing that this reservation entitled us to sit outside on the patio on one of the coldest days in this town in about 25 years. Oh, they may call it indoor dining, but dropping a few pieces of canvas around your patio and putting up some heatlamps does not count as indoor dining unless you’re a Bedouin roaming about trading spices for silks or a Hun trying to conquer Asia. They hadn’t even swapped out the patio furniture, so my whole meal was spent on an artistically “weathered” iron chair with broken armrest and seat that probably clocked in at about 34 degrees. And while the heat lamp kept the temperature toasty from my neck up, the weather system around my ankles was working its winter magic on my rapidly numb feet.

So it was a little chilly, you say, just have some soup and quit your whining. So I did, and the soup was delicious. It was a very unique sweet potato and red bell pepper soup that really hit the spot. The flavors were much more muted than I expected, but still tasty and warming. My attitude was definitely on the upswing, and I was looking forward to my entree, a “Crab Cake Caesar Salad.” My table mates and I chatted about work and munched on some bread for a while. Then we sat and stared at each other for a while. Then we ate some more bread. Then we all took turns going to the restroom. Then our driver went outside and fed some more cash in the meter. Then, after about an hour, we mentioned to our waitress (a very polite and willowy girl who showed no lack of sartorial quirkiness by brandishing a large silver tie clip on her breast) that we had seen no food fro quite a while. She apologized profusely and 20 minutes later had our food for us.

The food must have been stellar, you say, to have taken that long. Au contraire! My lunch, the long-awaited crab cake Caesar, turned out to be exactly what it sounds like, a Caesar salad with three small crab cakes. While not horrible, this was not an interesting dish at all. It would have been a little more memorable had the dressing been something other than a traditional Caesar dressing, like some unholy Caesar/remoulade hybrid, or maybe something with just a little kick to it. My fellow diners pointed out that the onion rings on their steak salads were ice cold. Whether this was intentional or a product of the 90 minute service lag I don’t know and don’t really care. Aside from that creepy guy who lived down the hall in your college dorm, nobody, and I mean nobody, likes cold onion rings.

Noting their errors in timing our lunch, the manager was kind enough to offer us a free dessert, which the waitress took to mean one free dessert for the whole table. We were all too tired and cold to argue with her. So we left Lucca, four of us, pissed off and cold, with a small to go box leaking apple crisp all over my boss’s slacks. I don’t think any of will ever go to Lucca again voluntarily, and I don’t think I’ll recommend Lucca to anyone that asks. But, if you happen to know of any wandering Asiatic hordes or nomadic tribes, you might tell them that there’s a place right here in Sacramento that will remind them of home.

Lucca-16th & J, Sacramento
Food * Service ** Ambience *