Mangia Mangia Key West

900 Southard Street, Key West, FL 33040 | Phone: 305-294-2469 | email: mangia-mangia@hotmail.com

After we settled into our room at Key West’s Island House Resort, we headed out for a walk and ended up in a little neighborhood market a couple of blocks away on Southard Street. We picked up a couple of beers and asked the woman behind the counter for a restaurant recommendation. She suggested two places, one of them Abbondanza, a restaurant that everyone in Key  West recommends, comes up first in every Google or Yahoo “italian restaurant key west” search, and quite frankly on a previous visit to Key West we found unworthy of being included in Mark’s Surprising Dining List. 

So to get to the point, she also recommended Mangia Mangia and I have to say we were a little skeptical based on her other recommendation! It took us three days to finally get around to dining there. When we did, man, were we amazed.  

The meal started with bread that, well, it’s bread. Seriously! I know good bread and I know bad bread, but most of it leaves me absolutely unaffected, including the good stuff. This was good bread.  Next up were they salads and they were good too. You know lettuce, tomatoes, some other veggies, olive oil and vinegar. I have to say the presentation was nice, way better than average, everything was very fresh, again way better than average, but alas, the salad was just a salad. The special Vinaigrette was just like everybody’s special Vinaigrette. 

Then came the main course and wow did everything change. We were kind of thinking by now that the food was just going to be average, which would be okay, but suddenly Mangia Mangia excelled!  

My dining partner ordered Rigatoni with Jumbo Shrimp sautéed in olive oil with prosciutto, garlic, black olives, shallots, fresh tomatoes and red pepper flakes and topped with a salad of radicchio, arugula and Belgian endive, followed with a dusting of Romano cheese. I ordered a house specialty, Pollo al Quatro Formaggio thin spaghetti, diced chicken breast in a rich cream sauce, enhanced with parmesan, Romano, fontanella and gorgonzola cheeses and topped with walnuts. Everything was absolutely perfect. As you can see from the photo we took, the presentation was ‘over the top.’ Most people say that appearance accounts for a big portion of taste perception and there was no way that anything that looked this good was going to be any less spectacular tasting. The pasta was made from scratch; the sauces were delicious and accented the other flavors without overwhelming them. 

You will also be impressed with the low-key atmosphere of both the place and the staff as well as the ice cold temperature of the dining room. Believe me, if you are in Key West in the summer, you are going to love the cool chill you get when entering. There is also a lovely garden area to dine in and at night the overhead lights twinkle in the summer breeze that rolls across the island from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico.

The restaurant was filling up as we left and we hope that a few local people in Key West will read this review and put Mangia Mangia at the top of the list when making an Italian restaurant recommendation. What a treat! 

One last thing- when you walk out, make a left and then make a left on the first street. You'll find the old Key West Cemetery dead ahead. What an interesting stroll we had through there. A good portion of the people were buried over 100 years ago. Many had graves that were marked as civil war veterans. Of course checking out cemeteries is a morbid thing to do, but how interesting it this one was!

BTW, if you’re wondering why there isn’t a bad review of Abbondanza included on our list, its because we don’t bother writing bad reviews. Who needs to know where not to go?