Al Vecio Portego

Ugh. I tried this restaurant after reading previous reviews.
It’s a sub far, over priced restaurant by Italian standard.
If you’re a tourist from US and used to Olive Garden, then go ahead and try this restaurant… Or any other. It wouldn’t make a difference since you have no standard!
Had salad, fettuccini with truffles, and house wine.
Salad– very large, rough cuts of cabbages and sorts. Did not care for it.
Fettuccini– under cooked and hard, lumped together like it was cooked hours ago. How can you mess up such a simple pasta dish? Flavorless disaster for 12 euros!
House wine– disgusting! There are ton of good cheap wine in Italy. This restaurant somehow managed to find the worst.
By the standard of this few dishes, it pretty much says it all about this restaurant. 2 star restaurant at best. I’m giving 1 star to bring the rating down to reality.

On our first night in Vicenza, I searched for a restaurant near our hotel; Unilocal was sparse so I had to use some competitors to track a place down and then sort out a route.
Al Vecio came up as a good local place that you could manage without any Italian and it was less than a 15 minute walk from the hotel. There was good signage off the street, which opens up into a courtyard where there’s parking and a patio, and a party (with kareoke!) seemed to be going on. Inside it’s a big space, with high ceilings and wooden beams aplenty, and warm yellow paint that gave it a cozy feel.
While they don’t have a big menu out front for tourists, they did have an English menu to give us, which took a bit of the gambling out of our meal. We settled on the Mediterranean bruschetta to start, gnochettini with bacon and ham for my wife, and penne all-​arrabiatta for me. A ¼L of house red wine was a mere € 2.50 — yes please!
Bread and our drinks came out quickly, as well as a bowl of Parmesan. The bread wasn’t the freshest at 10pm, but that wasn’t surprising. My wine wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad and served its purpose as table wine.
The bruschetta came soon afterward, six slices from the middle of a long loaf of bread cut lengthwise. It was covered with an impressive layer of mozza, and grape tomatoes. The cheese was good and the tomatoes were nice and fresh, and added a nice acidic pop to the bruschetta.
My pasta was blazing hot, and is probably the hottest pasta I’ve ever had. So it turns out that the «red pepper» in the description wasn’t just a bell pepper, and was more like «a lot of chiles». I put back a ton of liquid while eating it, and sweat out an equal amount. It was tasty though and the fresh tomatoes in it added little non-​spicy pop to the dish, but there was too much spice to notice or enjoy any depth to the sauce.
My wife’s gnoccetini was very novel — we both thought it was green beans at first arrival, but it turns out it was narrow gnocchi, coloured green and twisted a little at the ends to give them a bean-​like look. I couldn’t taste what was making them green, if anything other than food colouring, but the cream sauce was very good — thick, bacony and rich.
After asking for the bill, it came with small glasses filled with soft coffee-​flavoured ice cream, although it was so coffee-​ish that I wondered if fresh espresso was mixed in with some ice cream. It was delicious and a god send after the spice of my dish.
The bill came to a shockingly-​low € 27, an equally refreshing digestif after the tourist-​gouging prices of Dubrovnik and elsewhere in the much more tourist heavy areas of Italy.
Al Vecio is a great spot for incredibly affordable and delicious Italian cooking.

A friend of mine took me here for a first time visit and I have to say this is my favorite place here in Vicenza. Their Pizza is amazing! The staff were very friendly and the atmosphere was stunning! We had no wait time at all. We came in, sat down and after a little time of looking over the menu, we placed our order. The menu is in Italian, so if you have a translator, you’d be ok. But the food we ordered was absolutely delicious! The others around us had some amazing looking food too, I would highly recommend this place!