La Villa Restaurant and Wine Bar

January 18, 2024

Italian food is never a bad idea 🙃 La Villa is located in Kitisuru in a nice vast compound. It’s a beautifully done restaurant that has both indoor and outdoor sections, with plenty of space for large parties and intimate booths for smaller ones as well. I sat at a corner by a stunning wine bottle wall, the red tops and the dark bottles add to the moody ambience which I really love.

The menu is quite detailed with everything from pasta, to pizza to meat options and a vegan menu as well. What I noted immediately were the prices, they were quite steep, but expected for a place like this so come knowing you will spend a pretty penny.

As I was waiting to order, they served me a fresh basket of very delicious focaccia bread cut up into little strips to trick you into eating ALL of them at once 🤤 For context - I love bread, I really love focaccia bread… suffice it to say, that bread didn’t stand a chance, and apologies to my friend who found none left when she finally showed up. They did give her another fresh basket though, I only had one piece from this second batch.

Don’t be like me and eat so much bread and get too full to have actual food please. Do better. This mistake didn’t stop me from getting a cheeky starter though… I had the truffle mushroom arancini balls (KSH950). I’m game for anything with mushrooms so this was a no brainer choice and I’m glad I picked it because the balls were very very tasty 😉 Arancini balls are an Italian dish of fried breadcrumbed rice balls filled with savoury fillings such as cheese etc.; these ones had mozzarella cheese and the truffled mushrooms. It’s accompanied with two sauces - I didn’t like the grey one, the cream-ish one was much better. These balls and the bread together…?? Fantastic.

My date had the great idea to have dessert before our mains so we had the mixed berry cheesecake (vegan, KSH1,250/). It looked more blueberry than mixed berry but of importance is the taste… It was perfect. For a vegan dessert, I didn’t think I’d like it but I really enjoyed it, almost got another for takeaway but I need to practise self control when it comes to dessert because my sweet tooth has no boundaries.

For the mains - we got the Rigatoni All Amatriciana (KSH1,700) and the Linguine Al Pesto something… it has such a long name (KSH1,400). I tend to avoid pesto dishes at Italian restaurants because they usually put way too much pesto for my liking. I know I’m weird for not liking a lot of pesto. I chose the rigatoni dish because it’s tomato based and it has pancetta (bacon). I asked for extra mushrooms to be added because why not?

What was brought to me was the actual dish yes but where was the bacon? Pancetta is usually cut up into little pieces so it’s not super visible but you can tell when there’s cubes of it in your food and this one barely had any. There was plenty of mushrooms but barely any bacon which for the price of this dish… is not okay. I explained this to our server and they understood what I meant so the dish was taken back to the kitchen and brought back with a good amount of pancetta added into it.

The pasta was really good. I love a tomato-base pasta so the flavour and taste were 10/10 esp now with actual bacon + the added mushroom and topped up with some Parmesan cheese - so good! The ambience of the place as I had mentioned above is intimate, cosy yet formal - this is true fine dining with ambient music to match that isn’t too loud but not too quiet as well. The service was good, the servers were attentive and always on the lookout.

La Villa is great for date nights, business lunches/dinners, the outside area is better for larger gatherings especially in the evening with the greenery and twinkling fairy lights adding to the mood. There’s a little backyard with a small play area for the little ones as well.