Vinny’s Italian Grill and Pizzeria – Lorton, VA

I would describe this place as having an old country charm, except everything in it is Italian. I’m not sure quite how they pulled this off. Perhaps it was the two tables of “good ol’ boys” laughing and joking around in one corner, the table with the elderly couple in the other corner, a family with kids at yet a different table. The checkerboard tablecloths with cans of marinara sauce on racks for artistic effect. Maybe the biggest factor was the drive out to the restaurant from the rest of northern Virginia, one that is tree-lined and lonely, making a person feel as if they are on a country back road. Anyways, I knew that I was coming for their calzone and I chose their “Bellybuster”. This one carries a $9.99 price tag, but it is what I would call “medium-large”. Not as big as some of the other ones I’ve had but still more than enough for the average person to finish in one sitting. In this case, the price really justified the size of what you were getting. It didn’t take too long, and when the calzone arrived, it was a rectangle! Only Ledo’s was ever bold enough to make a square calzone before. Not that this means anything in particular, but it’s just interesting to look at. This calzone’s crust was both fluffy and crispy, it was brushed in butter which gave the outside a nice bubbled crust. The dough was sweet, but not too sweet. The guts of the dish contained sautéed mushrooms, mozzarella, green peppers, ground chuck, pepperoni, and onions. The vegetables were undercooked so that they were crispy and retained a lot of their aromatic properties. The mushrooms were sautéed perfectly. The pepperoni used was average, and had a decent amount of flavor. The ground chuck was important here because some other restaurants that included hamburger meat inside of their calzone didn’t pull it off quite right. This meat was actually seasoned, and you could pick out this flavor from the other flavors. It did not have a gamey taste to it. The dish was served with a nice wide bowl of marinara sauce, which tasted good but like it was a store bought sauce.  The waitress was a nice Korean lady which added to the oddness of my Floridian country experience, stepping into a restaurant that had all of the feel of a place I might have experienced back home but with a few different twists. If you look close enough, things at Vinny’s seem one way, but slightly twisted. I like it, and I will definitely be stopping in again if I’m ever out that way. I give this calzone an A- because it was done technically perfect, but lacked just an ever so slight amount of that quality that you would get from a high-end gourmet restaurant. With the first bite, you could tell it was cooked by a pizza place. Whether you mind that, or not, is all a matter of preference.