There are children — and adults, too — who eat only the plainest pasta with butter and cheese.
Well, kiddies, prepare to have your mind blown at The Old Spaghetti Factory, a chain restaurant with one of the most interesting butter-and-cheese pastas out there.
But first prepare to have your senses swirled by the stained-glass, old-timey decor.
The restaurant’s gastronomic calling card is its spaghetti with browned butter and aged mizithra cheese ($13.25), which the newsprint menu describes as “a treat for cheese lovers. Legend has it that Homer lived on this while composing the Iliad.”
The Homeric connection seems credible since mizithra, a hard sheep’s milk cheese, comes from Greece. So did chain founder Guss Dussin , who ate the butter-mizithra topping growing up.
The dish works because it’s simple and rich. Browned butter — salted butter heated until the solids caramelize — is nutty and gorgeous. Mizithra cheese is crumbly and salty. The Italpasta spaghetti is cooked Canadian-style, that is, past al dente.