Thirty-three years on Colorado Boulevard, an in-house bakery, and a veal osso buco that makes Pasadena feel like a neighbourhood — the Italian restaurant that Old Town built its identity around.
About Mi Piace
In the dining landscape of Old Pasadena, where restaurants open with considerable fanfare and close with less ceremony than they deserve, Mi Piace represents something increasingly rare: a restaurant that has spent more than three decades earning its position in the neighbourhood rather than occupying it by default. Located at the corner of East Colorado Boulevard in the heart of Old Town since its founding, Mi Piace has built a relationship with Pasadena's residents that resembles the kind of institutional loyalty that takes genuine quality to sustain.
The concept — "light Italian cooking with a New York accent" — is a useful shorthand for a kitchen that operates between the austerity of Italian regional tradition and the generosity of American Italian cuisine, finding the register where both sensibilities meet to produce food that is simultaneously familiar and accomplished. The in-house bakery is not a marketing detail but an operational commitment: bread arrives at the table warm, the pastries demonstrate real craft, and the kitchen's relationship with fermentation and flour informs every preparation that touches the oven.
The Veal Osso Buco, served with mushroom risotto in a pairing of classical Italian logic, is the dish that represents Mi Piace at its most authoritative: the veal braised to the point where the marrow surrenders and the gremolata cuts through the richness with the precision a less experienced kitchen might achieve by accident rather than design. The Chilean Sea Bass — a California Italian menu staple that lesser restaurants execute with contempt — receives here the attention the fish's price demands: properly cooked, sauced with restraint, presented without apology.
Pasta is the engine of the menu: a range of Italian preparations from straightforward to ambitious, each one demonstrating the kitchen's technical command of the form. The Seafood Pescatore gathers the produce of the Pacific into a tomato-based preparation that declares its Italian-American lineage without embarrassment. The cocktail bar, with signature drinks that have developed their own following among Old Town regulars, extends the Mi Piace experience into the pre-dinner hour and keeps the lounge populated on evenings when the dining room is full.
Mi Piace operates every day of the week, opens from midday through to late evening, and maintains the kind of consistent quality across all dayparts that a restaurant staffed entirely by people who have been there for years achieves naturally. Over 14,000 reviews online, accumulated across more than three decades: that is the track record of a restaurant that gets it right more often than not.
Why Mi Piace is Perfect for a Birthday
Mi Piace has spent thirty-three years in Old Pasadena becoming the room that the neighbourhood books for birthdays. The combination of a menu broad enough to accommodate the different preferences that always characterise a birthday table, a warm and animated atmosphere that does not require any work from the guests to generate, attentive service that understands the rhythm of a celebratory dinner, and a price point that leaves budget for the cake — all of this makes Mi Piace the birthday default for people who know Pasadena well. The regulars who have been coming for decades bring their children, who become the next generation of regulars. A birthday at Mi Piace is not a statement; it is a tradition.
Guest Reviews
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