A Less than Stellar Sandwich

Dispatches from SpeedGaming Live: Lil' Italian Gyro Wrap

When you’re at a convention you often have to grab food quick before your next event. Locations close to the convention will often get business, even when the good isn’t that great, simply because of their proximity. You could go get something good (like a fantastic plate of nachos)... or you could be lazy and go with something that’s right around the corner. This behavior often leads to you hitting the same place over and over simply because going anywhere further afield takes too much time, effort, or creativity to bother. This is why so many people at SG Live end up going to the Sheetz that’s just a block away even though their food (and coffee) sucks.

It also leads to me, once a year, hitting up the nearby Lil’ Italian Cafe American Italian Halal Restaurant. Yes, that is a mouthful to say, and yes it does kind of obscure just what this restaurant actually serves. Is it Italian food? That’s part of the menu, sure, and you can order pasta and pizza dishes if you want. But you can also get subs, salads, specialty sandwiches, burgers, and rice bowls, all from a variety of regions and nationalities. It’s a restaurant that does a lot but, arguably, doesn’t do any of it very well.

This year, when my group inevitably decided to order from Lil’ Italian, I grabbed the Gyro Wrapper Platter. I went with this sandwich option (yes, it’s a wrap, but they list it under “Specialty Sandwiches” on their menu alongside a falafel wrap, a spicy wrap, and a Chicken Tikka wrap that leaves me deeply confused about where I’m ordering from) for a couple of reasons. First, it’s generally hard to screw up a gyro since all it requires is gyro meat, some greens, feta, and a creamy sauce. And second, I really wanted more veggies since I’d already been eating like shit (as it’s a convention and that’s what you do) and the platter version adds on a salad along with the wrap.

Note that the salad for the “platter” isn’t in addition to any other sides with the “sandwich”. The wrap on its own is just the wrap, while the platter gives you the salad to go with it. If you were expecting fries or chips or whatever to come included with your basic meal, it doesn’t. You have to add those on extra as well. I figured a salad was a better option, but it does still bother me that it takes a couple of bucks more to bump this wrap up to a proper meal of sorts.

Regardless, wrap container in hand, I sat down to chow on this sandwich wrap and see if it was worth the money. And it was not. There wasn't anything inherently bad about the wrap, but there also wasn’t anything spectacular about it, either. It was a very basic, barebones gyro, all things considered. It’s got gyro meat, lettuce, tomato, onion, and feta on a rolled up pita, served with tzatziki sauce on the side. The additional salad was lettuce, tomato, and cucumber with ranch (I wasn’t given a choice of salad dressing, so if they have dressing options I didn’t get to find out what they were). It’s all just a lot of basics without much flair.

To begin with, the gyro meat was a tad dry. I don’t know if they have a full meat roller in the back that they take slices off of, but my assumption is that they do not. Likely they just have seasoned beef and lamb meat they cook ahead of time and then reheat when someone orders a gyro. That (assumed) process leads to meat that has some seasoning to it (although, I will admit, not that much) that also dries out during the reheating process. If not for the veggies and sauce, this would be a very dry wrap.

The veggies are unspectacular. Iceberg lettuce, basic slices of bland tomato, and white onion slices. Normally I expect a gyro to have cucumber in it, so I had to D.I.Y. that myself, taking the cucumbers from the salad platter on the side to put into the wrap. That helped some, but the wrap was really only saved by the tzatziki which wasn’t flavorful at all (tasting very white and very bland) but it at least added needed moisture. Bear in mind, the sauce was on the side so if you didn’t see it, or didn’t use it, the wrap would be dryer than expected.

Also, just of note, even the ranch was pretty bad. It was vaguely oily and salty, tasting not at all like ranch I would expect. I could tell it was supposed to be ranch, but it was bad ranch. This, along with the generally underwhelming veggies included in the salad, and the overall bland experience I had from the wrap, contributed to the entire meal being quite the disappointment all around.

Now yes, I know, I went to a restaurant called “Lil’ Italian” and I got not-Italian food. But as I’ve noted, this is a place with a wide variety of options from many cultures on offer. It’s a restaurant that begs you, in effect, to sample all their various wares because it didn’t want to settle down and do one thing (Italian food) really well. If they’re going to put it on the menu then they should not only expect people to order it but they should cook it properly. This food was bland and boring and not very good at all.

If I lived in the area and wasn’t there just for a convention, this wrap would put me off going to Lil’ Italian ever again. As it is, because of its proximity to the convention, I expect I’ll end up eating there again next year, and the year after that, and so on. But I will be sure not to get this Gyro Wrap again. It’s just not worth the money, and it’s not even worth what little time I spent going over to grab it.