Gusto. Hmm.
See, the problem is that Gusto has played host to some great evenings, or shall we say, has made an appearance during some great nights.
While they had their 50% off the food bill deal on during January, the Amigos and I decided to come to catch-up after a long time apart over the "Festive Season" and have some good, Italian food.
Now, I shan't be going into how much I love the outside and the inside and the classy feel t this place, nor will I go into the drinks. This is purely about the service and the food. I love how well dressed people are in this place.
The menu is extensive and has quite a number of different dishes to choose from. What I will say is that I LOVE that there are two options of plate sizes to order from ("starter" and normal portion size). When we eventually made up our minds of what to order we had: Gusto Dough Petals with garlic butter (definitely not what I expected them to be, but the garlic butter is DIVINE), garlic pizza bread with mozzarella which was exceptionally flavourless unless you bit down on one of the cloves of garlic on the 'pizza' and the deep fried calamari, which were alright. Just everything about the starters was very loveless and just a little uninspired. I know that we ordered quite a number of dishes but that shouldn't mean that the table should be too small to put all the plates on.
As our mains we ordered the tagliatelle with prawns and garlic, the smoked salmon and dill tagliatelle, the oven baked lasagne, and a confit of duck and pistachio rigatoni dish, which doesn't seem to be on the menu anymore as well as the Grana Padano risotto with pancetta. Now, it was me who ordered small versions of both the lasagne and the duck pasta dish, and I was left majorly underwhelmed by both. I cannot believe that the duck pasta dish was a small size because we even asked whether they had taken the correct orders - the portion is HUGE. The lasagne is on the small side, but honestly, I wouldn't have wanted more of it either. It was very dry, had hardly any sauce or comfort factor. The little bit of sauce that it did have was nice but could have done with a dash of pepper. Honestly, there is no surprise that that duck dish is not on the menu anymore. The rigatoni felt under cooked, and had no anything, the duck was soggy and the skin wobbly and was more shredded than anything, but the meat was decent, and the pistachios didn't really add anything to the menu. It really wasn't to my liking but I did feel bad letting quite a bit go back. I did mention this to the waitress and showed her the bits of uncrispy duck skin, and she proceeded to speak to the manager who came to us later to inform us that he had taken it off our menu. I really appreciated that.
The waitress, from Germany, was very nice but she did lack that all too famous German efficiency. When it came to ordering the bill, we didn't see her for around about 30 minutes. It was painful and by the time we had paid the bill and left we were happy to be out.
All in all, I still like Gusto for the drinks (and the fact that they have the Cocktail Club which means that signature cocktails are are £4.95 all day Thursday - Sunday), and I still love how classy it feels and I like that it is a nice restaurant, but the food just left me majorly underwhelmed. Shame. read more