A Review: Mavi Casual Italian

We tried a new restaurant last night for our January meal out*. It's called Mavi Casual Italian, a small local chain of restaurants with one store right here in our neighborhood. The Mavi chain is something of a spin-off of the locally-famous Cascone chain of restaurants.

Orders are placed at the front counter and the food is brought to your table. If you're thinking it's sounds similar to Fazoli's, then think again. The food at Mavi's is good. And the atmosphere is a lot less pre-fab than Fazoli's.

The specialty at Mavi is spedini (sometimes spelled "speidini"). Definitions of spedini vary, but it's basically grilled meat, sometimes lightly breaded, sometimes skewered. Shane had "Frank's Diablo Chicken Spedini" -- the sauce was a slightly spicy marina -- with the Tossed Italian Salad. I had Soto Shrimp Spedini, which was shrimp in a lemon-white wine sauce with provolone cheese, mushrooms and artichoke hearts. I chose the Classic Caesar Salad. Kat had the (very generous) Kids' Penne with Meatball meal.

We also ordered the Cheese Ravioli with Meatball; those of you who've met Shane know he sometimes likes to have seconds. As it turned out, his spedini was enough and we brought the ravioli home for Kat's and my lunch today. All of the meals came with a slice of garlic toast, and the spedini meals included Alfredo penne pasta.

The food was very good, service was friendly and fast, and the restaurant was clean (and busy by the time we left around 6:30 p.m.). Our only disappointment was that they were out of tiramisu.

The prices ranged from $3.99 for Kat's meal, to $11.99 for my shrimp entree. We used a restaurant.com gift certificate and ended up paying just $17 for all four meals plus drinks (including the price of the discount gift certificate).

Our suburb doesn't have any other Italian restaurants, so we are pleased to have Mavi here. We'll be going back!

The Mavi Casual Italian locations are: 8678 NE Flintlock Rd in Liberty, 704 E. North Ave. in Belton, and 19321 E. 40 Highway in Independence.



* We try to go out for a meal just once a month, to someplace new or somewhere a little nicer than A drive-thru or pizza buffet. It doesn't always work out that way, but we try; we seem to appreciate dining out more the less we do it.