(A collection of 8 European McDonald's reviews - spread across several years - #3)…read more
I used to be stunned at how many McDonald's there are in Italy and, mostly, how popular they are. This one is no exception.
This one is at the very end of Montesilvano, where this small metro area thins out. Montesilvano hums during the summer with its strand of "grande alberghi" at the beach. Outside of the season, it's fairly sleepy and its catchment area becomes almost exclusively Italian and local. The other thing that puts Montesilvano on the map, and they pee in their pants about it, is that Dean Martin's ancestors hail from there. I have a sense that he was not that connected to Montesilvano or the Italian language, given that he was born further up the Ohio River Valley where immigrants came to mine coal.
Most things about this McDonald's are good - the dining room and the outdoor area are kept up, the service is actually polite, there is a drive-through, the prices are better than those of an airport or train station in Italy, and the food is reliable.
I have eaten here some 3 times across a vast span of time. One night, I went in there to get a Big Mac combo. There was not much of a crowd. I put in my order quickly on the kiosk and it kicked out my number. In no time, the queue waiting in the lobby swelled. Sure, it could have been people coming in or more cars in the drive-through. I did order my Big Mac without onions, but that's the only customization I sought. I hope that this did not throw a wrench into their assembly line. It shouldn't. McDonald's restaurants know how to handle this, or should. Some people approached the counter asking about the status of their orders, including me. In the end, it took about 25 minutes to get my order. This tells me that something in their ops management might not have been optimized.
A three is implicitly the top of the bell-shaped curve on Yelp. I'll give this McDonald's that for the things it does right, but am also factoring in how steamed I was to have to wait 25 minutes for my meal when I walked in without much of a line to begin with.
