My family and I tried La Giostra after hearing about another hotel guest's "incredible experience there". While many of the reviews here are semi-accurate as everyone's dining experience is different, ours was very....upsetting.
To start, the staff were fairly blunt and were more worried about the large amount of people they let in than serving us. If a restaurant has only two designated seating times and is still worried about the amount of people they allowed in who have reservations, it shows they don't exactly have their act together.
They then push their comical "menu" infront of you, which is an amalgamation of an english written story about the restaurant and an entire menu in italian. Now, for most people that wouldn't be a problem, except that the menu items are descriptions of the dishes, not names per-se, so you're left deciphering exactly what is in each dish if your italian is a tad rusty. Now that's understandable, I don't expect to have every menu I receive in italy written in english, but if you have an entire three pages in ENGLISH telling the story of your restaurant to me first, you should be able to have the descriptions on there too. Of course, the waiters were blunt and cold to us when we asked politely about specific words we may not have known, displaying the cold anti-tourist / anti-american tourist attitude you see here and there in italy.
However, after all of the mistreatment, I was still willing to give the place a go, and the food quality was pretty good! It was definitely a solid dining experience, except for one CRITICAL blunder. Now, my family is of italian descent, and we live in the north east. My point is, we know our way around an italian restaurant fairly well, we just might not know every word in their dictionary. But they messed up an order by swapping ravioli with tortolini on two of our dishes, and proceeded to tell us when we called them out on it that in fact, our ravioli are actually "fresh made tortolini." I friggen laughed, called them out on it again, and just asked for the bill.
It's one thing to not like tourists, but they're still catering to them. It's like they want to have tourists wander in and become befuddled by their menu so they can "teach" them about proper italian food or something. Regardless they think all tourists are idiots, and especially americans. I've never been treated so poorly in a restaurant in my life.
Crappy service, mean and rude waiters, and they think tourists are stupid. Horrendous. Food was pretty good though, if getting looked down upon is your thing, hit up the La Giostra. read more