This is a beautiful restaurant, both outside and inside. Rather more costly than comparable restaurants, but we're happy to pay for quality.
Two of us ordered seafood risotto. It was very heavily salted. eating it resulted in a two day bout of food poisoning. HINT: heavily salted food usually means more than poor cooking skill. Heavily salting is usually done to mask the taste of bad (spoiled) food, as well as salt acting as a preservative.
My wife and I ordered scallops. They reeked. We called the waiter, said they were bad, ordered something else. From that time on, every time our waiter came to the table, or passed by, he made a snide comment in both English and Italian. The manager came over to argue with us, about how the scallops were not bad. Finally we finished our diner, asked for the check, and were told that they decided to only charge us for one of the scallop entrees. I told them that we were not going to pay for either. The manager repeated, over and over, the same thing: the scallops were not bad, they threw the returned scallops into the garbage, since they could not serve them to other patrons, we had to pay for them.
I strongly believe that this is a restaurant that takes the remains of what diners leave on their plates and recycle that into dishes, like risotto. This is a disgusting, but not all that infrequent a practice of restaurants. The heavily salted seafood risotto fits perfectly with this scenario.
The manager threatened to call the police. We insisted that she do just that. When no police arrived, I went inside to see where the police were. The manager expected her threat to make us afraid. I demanded that she call the police immediately, or I would. She did call the police, and when 2 police officers showed up, the manager quickly approached them, and they spoke for a long time. The policemen then asked me for my version of what happened. Miraculously, the discarded and in the garbage scallop dishes were presented to the police to smell. It was not hard to tell that they were freshly prepared, and they did smell fine.
The police told the manager that they thought treating a customer as she treated us was a pretty dumb way to run a business, and, since we did not eat the scallops, they could not charge us for them, and to take them off our bill immediately, which she did.
What occurred to me later was that since the bill was settled with the police there, inside the restaurant, we paid the exact amount of the corrected bill, and left no tip. If the restaurant behaved normally, we would have left a tip that would have exceeded the cost of the two scallop entrees.
The main point here is that this was about as bad as an experience as one can have in a restaurant.
THIS IS AN ESTABLISHMENT TO AVOID. I believe they recycle and serve table scraps to other diners, like in a stew, or in risotto, like the heavily salted risotto that made the people who ate it sick. THIS IS A PLACE WITH NASTY POLICIES, as indicated by the above described conduct of the restaurant. read more