AL FIRENZE RISTORANTE

EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTING DINING EXPERIENCE

We had made a dinner reservation on 27.03.2024. Our order was simple a prawn dish, a Capone pizza, and a chicken Alfredo pasta as a take away. We waited almost an hour for our meals to arrive. The pizza took slightly longer, with an apology from our waiter Andile about 15 minutes prior to being served. When it eventually arrived, the base felt cold to the touch, but the charred crusted indicative that it was woodfired, albeit having previously undergone the process. When I brought this to the waiter’s attention, he defended his stance by stating “all pizzas have a margherita base and the toppings are cold”. That was very clear from the pizza description on your menu as the different variants are marked “Margherita + …” That made no sense to me, as the pizza was the re-worked margherita pizza ordered by the 2 gentleman seated directly behind me, who ordered this to share, just prior to us placing our order. They subsequently cancelled the pizza order, having felt, and rightfully so, that their order was taking far too long to arrive. Our waiter who also served that table apologised for them not fulfilling their order, passing the buck on the kitchen staff not putting the order in timeously. He appeased them with some complimentary dessert. They paid their bill of R385 inclusive of R35 tip. Be that as it may I have eaten many pizzas in my lifetime from woodfired to conventional oven, from sour dough, thick, thin, pan to all sorts. When this pizza arrived cold, with freshly grated raw mozzarella cheese, cold cherry tomatoes cold parma ham and some fresh rocket, I suspected something was amiss. These ingredients were obviously thrown onto the pizza cancelled by those aforementioned patrons. Although this pizza appeared to have been previously cut with a cutter, it was so cold that the cheese had hardened hence it could not be neatly separated into cut slices. The base was cold, as were the ingredients. Yet when this was brought to the waiter’s attention he stated he didn’t want to argue with me. What? For their stuff up. Upon my insistence the pizza made it’s way back into the wood-fired oven and returned re-baked, hot with melted cheese, albeit not a fresh single baked pizza. This was indeed a very unpleasant experience, that left a bad aftertaste. I have been to your establishment on a few occasions, but this episode sticks out like a sore thumb. Misleading customers with this uncanny agenda of serving somebody else's order would have probably worked had they just popped this into the oven to heat up the additional ingredients. Desperate times like this would certainly compromise this restaurants image. Little wonder so much crockery was breaking that night, like a Greek plate smashing.