We can all agree that eating out at a restaurant is a fundamentally weird experience. This anchors your expectations for how you decided to spend your evening.
Pino's is next to the vet where we've spent many hours waiting to find out what's expensively wrong with our dogs and while waiting I've looked at the menu and thought "we should try Pino's." Bland origin story (foreshadowing).
After being seated my companion said "it feels like we've been transported somewhere else...but not Italy." Only a real misanthrope wouldn't be charmed by the plentiful elders in their dockers and button ups, and bored teenagers, and the bartender reciting quotes from Monty Python to her much older regular fans. Every wall surface has framing draperies, gallery rail, and track lighting, but no art whatsoever. There are two motivational (?) signs visible to both patrons and staff. One says "Be kind, work hard" and the other says "The world is understaffed. Be nice to those who show up." Okay!
The food was medium. Actually, everything about the experience was medium. I'm happy for them. They have a nice thing going and they are being kind and working hard. After a breathless recitation of the specials including pork and veal and other meats, we chose to try mushroom soup, bread, beans and greens, beet and carrot salad, and The Eggplant with a side of spaghetti with "Chef's sauce." It was all okay. The soup was very mushroomy and salty (fine), the bread was bread (neutral), the beans and greens were fine and/but very garlicky, the beet and carrot salad was a lot colder than we expected and texturally odd but it was vegetables and that's often what we want.
Things really went to hell with The Eggplant which was seemingly neither baked not fried but possibly cooked confit for 12-16 hours at about 100 degrees. It had a one dollop of ricotta on one of the six pieces and I got that piece. It was pretty hard to get off the big plate onto the small plates because of how mushy it was. Mostly I remember salt and eggplant skin. The side of spaghetti should have been a slam dunk (foreshadowing). It was wet like in a church basement and "Chef's sauce" let us down.
There were other things we could have tried that might have been better, but I'm not eager to return and do so. As usual, everyone else seemed to be having a better time with their food, so as usual, I feel wrong. But I'm entitled to be publicly wrong and privately right, I think. We evaluated the desserts (tiramisu, something chocolate, and something with four syllables involving strawberries maybe) but skipped them in favor of having cookies at home (didn't end up doing that, either). The wine (Willamette pinot) was pretty good.
I haven't decided on or if there will be any unified rating system, but here goes for now: Options? They have some, actually a fair number. Quality? Low. Ambiance? Good enough. Will I return (Often/Rarely/Never): Never.