Pranzo is the Italian restaurant that just opened at Waters Edge. Colombo could use some good Italian since most of our ‘Italian’ restaurants specialize in mostly pizza. The food at Pranzo is actually pretty good, there’s a view, and you’ll be glad to know it isn’t over-the-top expensive.
The Food
There’s a lunch menu and a dinner menu – the former is very limited, with just some appetizers, sandwiches and grill dishes, so even if you’re there for lunch, try asking for the dinner menu like we did. This one’s got a decent range of options of Italian pizzas, risotto, lasagnas and meat mains. They told us the meat is Halal but these guys also serve pork so yay for all you bacon lovers. We ordered a tandoori chicken pizza, minced beef lasagna and prawn ravioli.
The pizza (Rs. 980) was amazeballs, with plenty of thick, gooey cheese and vegetables. The tandoori chicken was well done though they were more generous with the cheese than the chicken (no complaints here), and the veggies were obviously only tossed in the pan for a bit so they were fresh and crunchy. Pictures do it better than words so check out our gallery for pictures of gooey Italian awesomeness if you don’t believe me.
The prawn ravioli (Rs. 900), a signature Pranzo dish, was probably the highlight of our entire meal: juicy prawns stuffed into soft pasta dough, sunken into a very thick, creamy lobster-cheddar sauce. The sauce which was more like a gravy, made all the difference, and this dish alone with some bread would actually be enough to get you full. Marry me, ravioli.
The lasagna (Rs. 950) came in a small hot-hot oven pot, about 4 inches wide, along with a little dish of cheese. It didn’t seem like a lot on first glance but on breaking into it, there was a whole lot of beef, and the lasagna slices were very thin and soft and slightly cheesy, so it tasted quite rich. We liked how the dish of cheese gave us the option of controlling how much cheese we wanted in our lasagna. This isn’t the best thing on the menu here but it’s still good.
Service & Ambience
The restaurant is quite nice and lounge-ey with a long leather sofa at one end against a brick wall, and dark dining furniture elsewhere with glass walls in the backdrop.
Waters Edge has a good outdoors ambience with dark cane furniture, a clean green expanse and the lake. It’s a romantic place to be perhaps in the evening when it’s not hot.
Service was kind of slow during lunch, it took about half an hour for us to get our dishes. Our waiter was quite friendly and attentive though, he even came and told us the Cinnamon Air plane was landing on the lake outside if we wanted to come look.
Conclusion
Pranzo is one of the good places in Colombo to sample Italian food. Their pizzas are some of the better ones out there and their ravioli is happiness in a gravy bowl. With taxes and all that jazz, our bill came up to Rs. 4000 for two of us – and there was still some lasagna and pizza left (cheese overload). So if you order wisely it’ll probably cost you around 1.5K per head, which is not so bad for the posh ambience and quality of food.
