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(One star)
I don't think we would ever have tried this place without a Groupon.You can tell it's a "trendy" place when you walk in the door. But, once in a while, a trendy place has decent food, and we'd already paid an entry fee, so we decided to stay. I wish we hadn't.
We ordered a variety of things to taste and share among the four of us. Altogether, we ordered two large pizzas of different flavors, a pasta dish, a burger, and a basket of truffle fries for our appetizer. The fries were lightly covered in truffle oil and fresh basil. None of us were particularly impressed, though none of us hated them. That was, unfortunately, the best part of our meal.
When the pizzas arrived, two different flavors, both with shockingly thin crust and very little on top - so little sauce that it had dried in the baking - we noticed that the shrooms pizza looked burnt on the bottom. The Margarita pizza was normal in appearance, browned appropriately. And, while the Margarita suffered from lack of toppings and iffy flavor, at least it wasn't black on the underside. Knowing that sometimes things can look darker than they taste, two of us tried the shrooms. We both agreed that we didn't enjoy it, in part because it was lacking flavor, but mainly because it tasted of burnt crust.
It's my opinion that you shouldn't ask how someone likes their burger cooked unless you can actually approximate the customer's wishes. This was probably one of the better meals, though it wasn't cooked the way it was ordered. We had also ordered butternut squash ravioli. There were five ravioli swimming in oil and two crusts of bread to sop up the "sauce" for a price of ten dollars. We tend not to like trendy places because they overcharge for poor food, and our observation wasn't changed by this location.
Realizing that none of us wanted to eat the burned crust pizza, I reported it to our waiter, along with a request for another drink for one of our party - the waiter hadn't shown up since our food was delivered and had to be flagged down this time. I said that we needed that pizza either removed from our bill or replaced. The waiter wanted to argue with me, claiming it wasn't burned, that it was dark from the coal fire process of the ovens. I pointed out that the other pizza was of normal color for crusts, and reiterated that it -tasted-burnt. I was shortly to feel that I was involved in a Monty Python skit, paying for the privilege of arguing that my parrot was dead. Even when he finally agreed to replace the pizza, he wanted to insist that our taste buds were at fault, not the pizza crust.
We are usually good tippers. It's not infrequent that we leave 25%, often 20%, and ALWAYS 15% if we even get slightly poor service. We do not stiff a waiter unless we are angry, and we were very angry by the time we left. We went at a slow time for the restaurant to beat the Valentine's Day rush, and our experience was considerably less than romantic or enjoyable.
The second attempt at the shrooms was not burned and had considerably more toppings. Had that been our first introduction to this pizzeria, we might have walked away with our taste buds happy, if not our wallet. Also, for what it's worth, if I wanted to buy my soft drinks by the bottle, I'd bring a six-pack with me to the restaurant. No ice in the water? Come on. Some trends should die.
