Emmy's Spaghetti Shack

For my last dinner in SF and for dinner with A and E, we wanted something different and interesting. J had told J about this spaghetti shack place that had amazing spaghetti with amazing meatballs. We were all intrigued. So we headed over to Emmy's Spaghetti Shack in Bernal Heights to try some of this illustrious spaghetti. I read that there would be a wait, but I was optimistic. First problem was trying to find a parking spot. That took awhile. When we finally got there, there weren't other people waiting. We thought we'd get to eat right away! Wrong! There was actually a huge table ahead of us, so we had to wait. We walked around a bit looking for other alternatives, then just decided to have some drinks at the bar. Eventually, we were seated.
Some complimentary bread while we looked over this simple menu. Although they do have a few other options, we were here for the spaghetti and meatballs.
A and E ordered the grilled polenta with sauteed mushrooms and mascarpone drizzled with truffle honey. Yum. I love me some polenta! J had never had polenta before. Or he didn't know if he had ever had polenta before. He officially likes polenta now!
J and I ordered the arugula, pear, and crispy speck salad with blue cheese crostini and caramelized shallots. We didn't know what crispy speck was. It's bacon! This salad was practically perfect, as long as you avoided the blue cheese. :-)
Ok, so the spaghetti! We all got the spaghetti with meatballs. You get three ginormous meatballs. The sauce is a bit on the spicy side, which surprised all of us. One would think Emmy's would want the diner to control the level of spiciness, but instead, Emmy's just makes the sauce spicy. I like spice so I didn't mind it. J would have preferred it to not be spicy, but he liked it anyway. These meatballs were quite good, but they were not the typical meatballs you would have expected in spaghetti. Normally, italian meatballs tend to be more juicy and made with egg and breadcrumbs and things like that. The thing that was unexpected about these were that when you would take a hunk off of the meatball, the whole thing would sort start falling apart. And you would see the ground meat marks in the meatball. As if it was just a plain wad of meat that was formed into a ball, instead of it having been combined with spices and breadcrumbs and egg and mixed well before being formed into a ball. It was just strange, but still tasty.

So the service... oh the service. Where do I start? Ok, so our server was nice, but he was a terrible waiter. He made two huge mistakes. First, he took our drink orders and completely forgot about it. We waited and waited and waited. And then we had to ask him about it. Then it dawned on him that he'd completely forgotten about it. Oops number one. Then next, he completely forgot to put in E's spaghetti order. So J and I had our plate, A had her plate, but E was spaghetti-less. And we were all starving so we started eating, while he had nothing to eat. And again, our waiter was totally clueless that he had forgotten about it. So then awhile later he came over, apologized, and said he would take care of E's drink. Remember, the drink that was part of all the drinks that he'd forgotten about? ~Sigh~ Eventually, E's spaghetti came out. This was after the rest of us were pretty much done our meals. We'll definitely remember this meal. Not necessarily for the food, but for the awful waiter!