Author: wordconlandmi1976

We were all looking forward to a nice dinner time among friends in Little Italy - because they serve delicious Italian food and you get this amazing feeling of the Italian far niente. Well, it was far niente, at least for the servers who "apologized"...by saying that they had been working since 4pm (it was 8pm and half of the tables occupied only). When we arrived, the table we had reserved couple of hours in advance was not even set yet. We had to ask twice for water, the bread only came an hour later - with no oil or butter, and the bread was cold and not fresh on top. The menu was completely in Italian and we tried to figure out for some things on our own, we had plenty of time anyway. While there was no wine menu at all, they had a menu of the day and you could choose among three starters - he said the name of each one which didn't tell a lot, when we asked for further explanations, he told us the Italian name (as if this helped, our faces said enough). They had already run out of one of the starter and replaced it by something else, btw, and when we asked for the dessert, he just said: "I'll see what's left." The starters? When I got the starter I realized it had an ingredient that I'm allergic to (I couldn't have known about it since it was the mysterious starter we did not understand and get any details). I never got something else instead of it but still had to pay the full price for the menu of the day. The other two starters: soup - waaaay too salty, and the salad - as if they had just thrown it on the plate and poured the vinegar on top. Diversity of the menu? Rather poor. We wanted to get either a real Italian pizza or lasagne - we were disappointed with both since they were missing. Main dish? Nothing spectacular, we got it after more than two hours and realized our home-made pasta was better (and also looked much better!) than what we had on the plate. Even the parmesan that you normally get freshly shredded on the spot was thrown on the pasta in a big hurry, not to mention the parmesan had no smell of cheese. Our Brazilian friend who is used to spicy food got the seafood risotto so spicy she couldn't eat it. The dessert was the best thing we had, for real. But still - only two choices: carrot cake or crême brulée. The first one was really sweet and dry and the second one was delicious but cold! Yeah, no joke. Clean? If a restaurant serving bread in mouldy baskets means cleanness, then yes! We found it disgusting... We had fun with friends, however, we were annoyed again and again, waited too long for food we did not enjoy. All in all, it was rather a challenge than a chill nice out.