It's Hard To Find Dinner

It's funny. I came all the way to Basel to work with one of my customers. There were 4 people I was working with, and not one of them was Swiss! we had a Brit, a German, a Croatian, and a Brazilian, but not one Swiss. After meeting up with my Brazilian colleague, we set off to find some food for dinner. While I was walking around some more in Basel, I had come upon this cool looking rock-n-roll type place on a little side street up a hill. We tried this place first and we couldn't eat there because they were having a special event in the dining room upstairs. The only place we could hang out was the bar area and that was full and packed. So we moved on. It was my colleague's turn next so we walked a little bit to another cool looking spot. We weren't sure if they served food or not, so we asked. Although they did have a food menu, it was really just appetizers or steak. We really weren't in the mood for either. So we tried again! We went next door to another place and they told us they had just closed the kitchen. Dammit. Were we going to get to eat tonight? The lady who had just rejected us kindly told us that the pizza place across the street would still have food. So we said ok, because honestly, we simply couldn't take any more of this food rejection!

This is how we ended up at Centro. When we got there, the place was positively packed! And this made sense to me because even though there are so many other restaurants in Basel, apparently, it's quite a challenge to actually eat in any of them! Centro is an italian joint. They have pizza and pasta and other italian fare. When we first looked at the menu, it was really hard to figure out what was going on. The dishes were named in italian and they were described in swiss german. Although it's fine for me to figure out that lasagne is lasagne and that penne is penne, it was what was on them / in them that was hard to figure out from the swiss german. Eventually, I got an english menu and was finally good to go!I ordered the penne centro, which was penne with chicken and pepperoni in a creamy tomato sauce. It took forever for our food to come out. And we were both so damn hungry at this point. But it was totally worth the wait. I loved this dish! The sauce was perfect and although there wasn't that much chicken, what chicken there was was perfect. I ate the whole thing. As in I cleaned the plate. Yes, I stuffed myself silly. And if there had been more, I would have eaten more, as it was an amazing pasta dish. I don't actually recall pepperoni being in this, but I didn't care. And it looks like a hot damn mess in this plate, but trust me, it was damn good. If I'm ever in Basel again, I would get this again!