"Oh you went to Fasta Pasta as a kid too?" @ Vapiano

"It's like the 90's all over again, but, you know, with smart cards."

Here's a joke for you: Vapiano.

Oh wait, no, sorry, too soon. Here's a joke for you: Two management consultants walk into a too-faux-hip-for-good-food pasta bar and spend all of their meal discussing the merits of the process design behind how they make your food.

Not a very good joke. Not a very good night.

Vapiano seems to be the first of what I am sure the owners hope will be a Grill'd esque chain of 'made as you watch' pasta bars nation wide. You go up to the server (replete with David Foster Wallace-esque official uniform bandanna) and select your sauce and pasta combination, get up-sold some bread, and then wait. Some time, and potential awkward small talk with a cashier who is also cooking your dinner, later... food! Really bad food! Meanwhile a long queue of disgruntled customers is forming behind you because each transaction takes 10 minutes.

It is a nightmare of business process design - it takes a whole bunch of good ideas and combines them infuriatingly. For instance, at the door, you get issued with a charge card. You use this to order your food. It serves no purpose that pay wave couldn't have solved for cheaper. This is the definition of the Vapiano business model.

They are doing Fasta Pasta, again, only it isn't the 90's any more, and people, you know, people like flavour now.

Now, fasta, to the Pasta.

Not gluten free, nobody cared about gluten at Fasta Pasta in the 90's, so why should you?

The dishes had names, they were forgettable, so as we described them to each other: I had the "tomato-y one with no salt and lots of cheese because of a cheese up-sell" and my dining companion had the "creamy, spinach-y one with some cherry tomatoes and, oh look, a prawn".

To go into detail would be to recount a litany in boredom. However, the short version is - the pasta was well beyond al dente and into 'raw' territory. The sauce was uninspired and desperately under-seasoned. It was also somehow almost entirely salt free despite being chock full of mozzarella ($1 up-sell).

My dining companion didn't hate his, but he didn't think the noodles themselves were all that great. And that about a place that makes its own pasta and sings its own pasta's own praises everywhere you look.

Don't go. You won't enjoy it. Invest though, people will lap this stuff up.