Our first and last visit to Mattoni started out great. The restaurant sat us right away, it's modern and clean, with friendly service.
We started with the muscles and fried cheese. The muscles were tasteless, but presented beautifully. The fried cheese was tasty.
For entrees we ordered the scallop pasta, the veal picatta, veggie pizza and sirloin steak.
The pizza: delicious and perfect.
The steak. Also perfectly cooked. The salad dressing isn't great it's much too sweet.
The veal picatta: worst I've ever had. It's grilled, tough meat, with an icky sweet sauce, a sauce that would be served over a dessert. The potatoes with it were good and the salad dressing was much too sweet to be enjoyed.
The scallop pasta: this was a dish with a red sauce and grilled scallops for 15,95£. The sauce was far too bitter and acidic, as if it hadn't simmered long enough, also much too sweet. The scallops were few (2 small ones), and the pasta was mushy. We sent this dish back and asked for the sirloin as that was the best dish at the table.
The server was nice, we simply said our daughter didn't like it, the server asked no details, so we didn't go into detail about what was wrong with the dish. In the end, they took £5 off the price instead of comping the entire dish. The manager said she was unable to comp a dish that the customer dislikes, if we had said it was too sweet or too salty then she would have.
Ok...that's ridiculous. The customer was not happy with the dish, spent a lot of £ otherwise and had one bite before sending it back.
The steak came out and was good.
We asked for the dessert menu, we looked at it and the server came back 10 mins later and 3/4 of us wanted creme brûlée, she told us they were out of it. That would have been nice to tell us before we spent time deciding on that.
We got the ice cream which consisted of about two tablespoons of ice cream on a plate.
The cheese cake, which was a good size and pretty good.
The chocolate box, which was dry and mediocre.
The cheese plate, 2 out of 4 of the cheese was good. Which is not surprising as cheese is an acquired taste.
The manager did a candle and sang happy birthday to my daughter as it was her bday.
In conclusion, the food is just ok, mostly hit or miss, their sauces are definitely lacking in flavor, the seafood is inedible.
Get the pizza or steak, if it's disgusting make sure to tell them exactly what they did wrong so you don't pay for a dish to be thrown in the trash (bin).
We probably would have come back many times for pizza if the manager had simply taken that dish off the bill. It was tacky and petty to charge the customer. We spent 125£ for dinner with no alcohol. read more