If you’re looking for an experience similar to Chipotle, but with Italian-style street food, Piada is a great choice.

Piada is an Italian-styled fast food restaurant fit with a modern décor of sheet metal walls, wooden dining fixtures, and flat based gray concrete floors to create a modern dining feel, similar to Chipotle or Qdoba.

Piada can be grouped under the title of a fast food restaurant, but it’s not like other restaurants that fit this category. It’s more of a step up from a local McDonalds, but doesn’t quite meet the standards of a high class restaurant. The dining experience is accompanied by disposable dining utensils, plates, bowls, and a self-serve beverage station, adding to the feel of it being a quick dining restaurant.

What sets Piada apart from any other quick dining restaurants however is its food.

The most striking feature of Piada’s menu is their use of the piada. When I first visited one of the chains, I confused the piada to be a tortilla, but one of the chefs jokingly corrected me saying, “A piada’s like a thin crust Italian dough, kind of like a tortilla, but way better. At least I think so.”

The piada can then be built upon, being eaten as something similar to a wrap, dubbed the piada, or placed inside of a pasta street bowl.

The pasta street bowl, which ranges in prices of $6.85 to $7.25 for a small bowl and $7.85 to $8.95 for a regular size bowl, consists of pasta, as well as the customer’s choice of meat, toppings, and of course, pasta sauces.

The choices for meats can be chicken, steak, Italian sausage, a vegetarian choice, crispy chicken fritte, and calamari. The choices of toppings range from artichokes, black olives, cucumbers, and mushrooms to mixed greens, mozzarella cheese, and feta cheese.

The sauce selections can be broken down into categories of hot and cold. The hot sauces consist of pomodoro, diavolo (which is spicy), and parmesan alfredo. The selection of cold sauces is fresh basil pesto, as well as red pepper pesto and creamy parmesan.

I ordered a pasta street bowl, with steak, mixed greens, black olives, red onions, mushrooms, and mozzarella cheese. One thing to take note of when ordering is that the serving sizes of the meat that they place on your pasta bowl is only a small scoop of meat, so if you’re someone who has a large appetite, you may want to order a second serving (50 cents).

The mixture of the steak and the diavolo sauce is what really hits you when you first bite into the pasta street bowl, depending on how well you mixed it up. The spice and tang of the steak and the diavolo sauce work really well together, creating almost a sharp and seasoned sensation that goes along perfectly with the mixed greens and red onions.

Halfway through eating the bowl, once the contents are fully mixed is when the bowl really tastes the best, and you can wrap the contents up into a piada, if you happened to include a piada inside your street bowl. This creates a unique experience of Italian eatery with a burrito type setup.

The cannoli chips ($2.95), which are more of a side dish, are the only dessert selection at Piada. Although the main dishes such as the pasta bowl are a pretty big size concerning their food quantity, the cannoli chips are definitely worth a try.

The cannoli chips truly represent a fast food street style take on a classic Italian desert, in which what would normally be the outer layer of a cannoli are made into chips, and the cream is given beside the chips in a small container to dip in. The chips alone are too sweet, but once accompanied by the right amount of cannoli cream, work together to counteract the sweetness and cream flavor to create that classic cannoli taste.

The chips taste just as good as a normal cannoli, but definitely depict the feeling of a fast food restaurant in their chip form.

As you’re waiting for your food, the different selections don’t really look like much, but the smell of the food truly stands out. As soon as you enter Piada, the scents of the various seasonings, meats, and cooked toppings hit you like a train, forcing your mind to focus on nothing but how delicious the food is going to taste.

The wait time for the food at Piada varies depending on how long it takes you to order, which is an upside because all of the food is kept in hot pans and ready to be served at your disposal.  During my visits to the Cedar Rd. location, I waited in line for about three minutes maximum, and it took me around a minute to a minute and a half to customize my meal.

One thing to take into consideration concerning the time it takes to wait in line, is that the wait changes depending on the days you go and at what times.

The service at Piada, much like every other fast food restaurant, truly depends on the chain and who happens to be working there that day.

One Friday afternoon that I attended the Piada chain on Cedar Road in South Euclid, I had a really personable experience with the workers, and was even able to crack a few jokes while I was ordering.

On a different occasion however, when I went to the same location on a Monday night, the service wasn’t as optimal as one might wish. One worker slowed down my meal because she was unable to find a regular sized pasta bowl. She then tried to make another worker go grab the bowl for her, as she yelled at him across the kitchen, and ended up slowing my meal down. This was only a minor setback however, considering the meal I was about to eat.

Piada is definitely something that truly is unique and stands out from other fast food restaurants and burger joints. The idea of building upon the basics of a subway or a chipotle, but with Italian food, is something that isn’t that common amongst restaurants, but has an alluring and unique flair to it.

Junior Jason Zak had a positive experience at the Cedar Rd. Piada. Zak said, “It’s really good food, and a pretty cool restaurant.”

Whether you’re out to lunch, looking for a convenient but quality dinner, or just hungry, Piada is a great choice when going out to eat.