Entrées
John: I’ve only come across three things in my life that everyone seems to like – ice cream, pizza and penguins. Ice cream isn’t hard to do well, and penguins are always cute and cuddly. So they’re no-brainers.

However, pizza is an art. I like my Papa Johns, Dominos and Pizza Hut, but I only eat them when there is no other option. Now I can add Mona Lisa to my list of other options. Their pizza is fantastic and it comes in an amazing variety. They have pizzas with artichokes, pizzas with Gorgonzola cheese and even a pizza for vegetarians. Tim and I sampled one that was half Mona Lisa special (pepperoni, sausage, meatball, mushrooms, green peppers, onion and black olives) and half white (no traditional red sauce, ricotta cheese).

The pizza was crisp without being hard, the crust melted in my mouth and the toppings tasted incredibly fresh.

The white pizza was good, but I’m a traditional pizza guy. I need my red sauce and my 37 toppings, which incidentally is about how many we got on our slice of Sicilian pizza. This square deep-dish slice was a meal unto itself. It was fluffy, tasty and the size of a small child’s head. It would probably take about 10 people to finish off a whole Sicilian.

We also had the veal saltimbocca, which I liked, and a meatball pasta dish, which unsurprisingly tasted exactly like pasta and meatballs (probably not something you want if you’re going for something different.) I’ll let Tim go into details on those.

Tim: We had a homemade pasta topped with marinara sauce and a couple of meatballs. I’ll complain first, and rave second. The meatballs were small. For that size I would have hoped for at least four of them. And the sauce was a very basic marinara. I like when a sauce sort of fills your mouth with flavor, and that did not happen here.

The veal saltimbocca was a pleasant treat, however. Topped with a brown sauce, cheese and prosciutto it was a very interesting combination of flavors and textures. (It also comes with a healthy topping of mushrooms, which are easily avoidable if you are so inclined.) I don’t venture into veal very often, but this was a rewarding exception.

And the pizza was fantastic.

Dessert
John: For dessert, we did what anyone wanting a taste of Italy would do. We ordered only items ending in the letter “i.” This meant cannoli and spumoni.

Think of spumoni like Neapolitan ice cream, only instead of vanilla, you get pistachio to go with the chocolate and instead of strawberry you get cherry. Although, to me it would make sense to ditch the chocolate and keep the pistachio (green), vanilla (white) and cherry (kind of red). That way you could fashion your very own ice cream Italian flag.

As for the cannoli, if you’ve had one and you liked it, you’ll enjoy it. If you’ve never had one, the outer shell tasted like a sugar cone, except better. On the inside is a filler that has the viscosity of cheesecake, but only slightly tastes like it. Then they top the thing with chocolate chips. I love chocolate chips.

Tim: I had no idea what Spumoni was, but like Breech said the fact that it sounded Italian was enough to get me to order it. The pistachio ice cream was a new one for me, but it was absolutely delicious. And the cannoli was rich, but small enough that you could eat the whole thing and not feel too sugared out.

Final Impression
There are definitely a few other things I liked about this restaurant, other than the great food. First, I swear that owner Sal Mangino is Joey Tribbiani’s long lost cousin. When we met Mangino after the meal, I had to suppress every urge I had to ask him to say “how you doin’?”

The guy is unmistakably Italian, and it’s always a good thing to know that the owner/chef of an Italian restaurant is Italian.

Also, the versatility of this restaurant is amazing. Mona Lisa has the type of atmosphere that could cater to a kid’s birthday party (One slice of Sicilian just might satisfy the whole brood) or a date night for a husband and wife looking to get out.  A more appropriate name for this place might have been another Da Vinci painting, Vitruvian Man. That painting is supposed to represent the ideal proportions for a man. Since the restaurant offers ideal portions at ideal prices, Vitruvian Man would only make sense. However, I suppose telling your date you want to eat at Vitruvian Man just doesn’t have the same ring to it.