While in Lexington, Kentucky Saturday, we decided to try Travinia Italian Kitchen.  Travinia is located 3565 Nicholasville Road  at the Fayette Mall.  The Italian Restaurant looks great both inside and outside and has a large number of friendly staff.

When entering an Italian restaurant you are often hit by the rich aroma of herbs and spices which season the Italian food.  Travinia is not that way.

To start our meal we ordered crispy calamari.  The dish comes with banana peppers, sweet peppers, pepperoni, garlic butter and scallions.  What we received was uncrispy calamari with pickled banana peppers.  It appeared that the cook did not have the oil hot enough when he or she put the calamari in, but set the timer as if the oil was the proper temperature.

For our main course, my wife selected Pollo Isabella, which is an oven roasted chicken breast served with sun dried tomatoes, spinach, goat cheese and a lemon basil beurre blanc. The meal was warm, not hot, but the chicken was cooked completely.  The spinach was not cooked or even wilted from having the chicken placed on it.  The temperature of the plating and the food would lead you to believe that the chicken was precooked and reheated in a microwave then placed on spinach.

I ordered the Italian Nachos for my meal.   At Travinia the nachos come with fried chips, Italian sausage, black olives,  banana pepper, scallions, tomatoes, provolone, and asiago cream sauce.  The sever asked if I would like blackened chicken on it, but I felt that the Italian sausage would be enough.  When I received the nachos, I found the chips to be oily.  The cheese sauce was good but not hot.  If anything I would call it luke warm.

As I ate, digging deeper into the stack of chips, I wondered where is the Italian sausage?  I adjusted my glasses and found it.  The sausage was cooked in the cheese sauce.  The size of the sausage was close to a grain of rice.  If the gray particles had ever had any flavor, it had long ago been cooked out of them and then masked by the cheese sauce.

The meal was very disappointing. We do not plan to go back to this restaurant.  Maybe we went on a bad day, but there are too many great Italian restaurants in Lexington to risk another disappointment.  If the cook at Travinia, who prepared our meal could taste the calamari at Malone’s or the Italian nachos at Johnny Carino’s, they would never microwave again.