La Roccia - The trap of tourist traps:
We stayed at Hotel…read moreAlveci (which actually is a really nice place), about 300m from the historic gate / draw bridge to old town Sirmione.
Upon check-in we were handed a small card with a few of "their" restaurants - where we would get 10% off as guests of the property.
Growing up in the Alpine region of southern Germany, and therefore having visited Lake Garda dozens of times before, we normally would have never dined at an establishment located so central in such a high tourist traffic area.
But I guess we spent a bit too much time at Jamaica Beach (very northern tip of the Sirmione peninsula) and basically were just looking for a place to have a halfway decent meal on our walk back to the hotel.
So we remembered that little card issued by our hotel, checked the restaurant reviews online and decided on La Roccia as the supposedly best option.
Boy, were we wrong.
We ordered beef tartar to share, gnocchi with meat sauce, and pizza capricciosa.
The tartar dish was the worst we have ever had. Not only totally blant, but also not diced/cubed, and the connective tissue not removed. The result was an extremely chewy dish of large chunky pieces of skirt steak (at best) covered in raw egg. Yuck.
The pizza....well, any - even supermarket frozen / domino's /pizza hut - that we have ever had before, was better than this soggy, leathery piece of barely cuttable dough. A disgrace to Italy's national dish.
And the gnocchi... never arrived. Despite blue tooth/.. POS devices used by the wait staff.
"There was a mistake in the kitchen". Or the order was never put in.
When it was time to pay we were directed to the register inside. We took out the 10%-off-card from the hotel (should have been 100% off) and presented a major credit card to pay for the disaster dinner
What followed then was a classic Italian scheme from the 1990s tourist rip-off playbook: the POS wifi/blue tooth connection for payments conveniently failed at this very point in time (so the charge can not be disputed later). For some reason the connection seemed still to be working fine on the waiters' devices. Our only options were to either pay cash or wait indefinitely until the credit card payment pad may or may not come back online.
The floor manager's command of English (who was able to perfectly seat and attend to guests from various contries before) all of a sudden ceased to exist and therefore was unable to understand what we tried to address.
All he did was to show us a print out that the 10% off he took supposedly was the rate of state imposed taxes on food that he had to cover. Not our problem, if the incentive given by their partner hotel does not work out for your business, please don't offer it. Or make our guests feel bad about it. Especially not about a 60 Euro bill for a sub-par meal. The burden is shared, we also pay an annual fee and possibly interest rates to use credit cards.
And yes, despite everything we left a 10% tip for our waiter.
However, since we were really exhausted at that point late in the evening, and did not want to wait indefinitely, we ended up paying in cash: Win tourist trap.
For a relaxed and tasty dinner experience just avoid this place. Yep, they did pull a fast one on us.
Apparently the old rule still applies: "when in Rome - or Italy in general - do as the Romans do. Or at least research and eat where the locals eat.
