Creating your own food can be more satisfying than creating your own reality, which usually leads to irritating debates with talking zoo animals after sucking the world's chocolate oceans dry. Keep it together with today's Groupon: for $8, you get $16 worth of pasta, pizza, and more at Pastalini. Choose between the Miramar Road and Linda Vista Road locations.

Winner of San Diego Living’s Pasta Wars, Pastalini enables marinara guzzlers to choose from a variety of tempting ingredients and forge phenomenal pasta, pizza, or salad recipes specially tailored to individual tastes. Noodle buffs can sculpt a specialized pasta bowl ($6.39) by fusing flavors such as rigatoni, pesto, and grilled chicken topped with spinach and black olives or prep alfredo-doused grilled shrimp and english peas for seafood prom with a helping of elegant bowtie pasta.

California-style pizzas ($6.95 for a 10”) serve as a blank canvas for ingredient artists, who can paint a portrait of former president William McKinley with pomegranate meatballs. An array of customizable salads ($6.49), baked pastas ($6.49), and pitalini—a pocket bread bundled with a choice of ingredients ($5.99)—cater to every impulse, appetite, or dodecahedron-shaped taste bud.

Reviews

Pastalini won Channel 6's San Diego Living Pasta Wars challenge. Ninety-two Yelpers give the Miramar Road location an average of four stars, and 15 Yelpers give the Linda Vista Road location an average of 3.5 stars.

• The workers are super friendly and will give you samples of the sauce if you are unsure about what sauce to get. They will also make some awesome recommendations. – chris l., Miramar Road location, Yelp, 8/24/10
• seriously DELICIOUS. out of this world good. i like spicy, and this puppy delivered. the shrimp was cooked just right, and the pasta put it all together. – Ferdi E., Linda Vista Road location, Yelp, 8/25/10