I recently dined here with a large party and I must say I was very disappointed in the food. The waitress was nice, and we chatted for a bit. It was her first day working at this restaurant, but she was an experienced waitress and worked at another restaurant with the same owner. So it was her first time working at this specific restaurant. Anyways, she was nice and did her best. Very communicative and sweet, and made sure she got all of our orders correct. It seemed like she was the only one working there, maybe they were short-staffed or something but it was a Friday so I’m surprised there weren’t more people working there. When we walked in there was no one at the register so we asked the bartender where to go since we had reservations. She pointed us to the dining room where they had a beautiful table set up for us and a nicely lit room with a calm, classy, Italian atmosphere. Anyways, our party of 10 mostly ordered chicken/eggplant parm, penne à la vodka, or salads. Each entree comes with a soup or salad. The soup of the day was sausage and lentil (kind of made my stomach turn, but I won’t yuck other people’s yum there). I ordered the filet mignon, medium rare, which came with asparagus and mashed potatoes, with a mushroom vinaigrette drizzle, and a side salad with balsamic vinaigrette. The whole table was given bread baskets with some warm, sliced Italian bread, and some DELICIOUS garlic knots. If you are going to order anything from this place, order the garlic knots!! The waitress put down some olive oil, Parmesan cheese, and butter packets for the bread too. When my salad came out, it was completely SOAKED in balsamic vinaigrette, and the lettuce and spring mix was so wet and slimy that I couldn’t even eat it, so I gave it to my dad who eats everything. Even he couldn’t eat it. So that’s saying a lot. The quality of the greens in the salad itself was also awful, you could tell they weren’t exactly fresh and had slightly browned on the edges, the veggies weren’t crisp and cold as if they’d been refrigerated recently. Basically the salad tasted like it was sitting out for 45 minutes before a server drenched it in dressing to cover up the fact that it was so grody looking. It was gross. But what should I expect from a basic Italian restaurant that gets medium amounts of traffic? It’s not like they are a 5-star restaurant, so I ignored the salad.
When the food came out, it wasn’t very hot but kind of lukewarm, but that didn’t put me off too much. I was just excited to eat. First of all, the second I cut into the filet I knew it wasn’t real filet. It cut more like a hamburger that had been on the grill than a medium-rare filet, which cuts like butter. This filet was gamey and had fat around the edges, was difficult to cut, overcooked, chewy, and appeared as if it was thrown on an actual grill rather than pan-seared. It was topped with mushrooms glazed in this overpoweringly vinegar-tasting vinaigrette. There was not even a hint of sweetness, almost as if someone squirted a bottle of vinegar directly onto the steak and mushrooms. There was no “glaze,” it was a watery, brown, vinegar mixture that I seriously think was just balsamic vinaigrette with extra vinegar. Now, onto the asparagus. Overcooked and underflavored. I could barely chew them, they were practically crunching in my mouth like carrots every time I took a bite of one. Lastly, the mashed potatoes. You won’t believe this guys, but they weren’t real mashed potatoes. Nope. They gave me instant mashed potatoes as part of my $50+ entree. My family suggested I made a mistake ordering filet mignon from an Italian restaurant, and that may be the case. But to get it so wrong actually seems difficult, and if you can’t even make any of it right, why make it at all? I ordered the most expensive dish on the menu and it was one of the worst (probably the worst) filets I’ve ever had, and I’ve ordered this dish from hundreds of places since it’s my favorite meal. According to my family, their dishes were very basic and noting to write home about either. Won’t be back.