Insultingly poor service and downright rude waitresses. Save your time and money by giving a different restaurant your business.
My friends and I had walked by this place everyday during our stay in Florence. Intrigued by the enticing ambiance and the rustic, warm decor, we were excited to give SimBIOsi a chance. The rest, from here, was all downhill.
When we arrived, the wait was relatively short. All four of my friends and I were seated within 10 minutes of our arrival. The seating was interesting - one long wooden table sprawled out across the entirety of the restaurant. No problem! We happily took our seats.
About 10 minutes had gone by and nobody had welcomed us, brought us menus or offered us water. One of my friends had to flag down a waitress to request menus and water - a premature red flag during this nightmare of a dinner. We looked over the menus for about 5 minutes and were ready to order. Once again, the waitress took about 10-15 minutes to return to the table and take our orders.
I ordered the wild boar ragu pappardelle. When it arrived, I immediately noticed a coarse, thick black hair on one of the pieces of pasta. I am usually not one to complain, but this was a turn-off to say the least and all three of my friends and I were repulsed by this. I flagged down our waitress to tell her that there was a hair in my dish and to politely request another. She examined the hair, rolled her eyes and stormed off without apologizing for the incident. About 5 minutes passed and she returned with another plate of pasta (I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same dish with the hair removed from the one piece of pasta.) She approached the table and said, "this is yours" while plopping the plate down in the middle of the table. My friends and I were taken aback by her blunt demeanor and the fact that she showed absolutely no effort in apologizing for the inconvenience. To make matters even worse, a few minutes later the waitress came to my side of the table and got down next to my ear and said, "The chef is requesting I tell you this. All of our kitchen staff wears hats, so the piece of hair must have been your own." Absolutely appalled by her comment (I have long, chestnut brown hair - and it was pulled back, I might add) I looked over at the exposed kitchen (it's behind glass panels in the middle of the restaurant, so you can see the staff cooking the meals) and I saw that the majority of the chefs had exposed, thick, dark beards, which clearly accounted for the coarse, black hair that was on my pasta. The waitress stormed off once again and my friends and I were all left with astonished, blank looks on our faces.
It is simply never appropriate to treat customers in this manner, whether it is a "relaxed" European restaurant, an American restaurant or otherwise. It is never appropriate to falsely blame the customer for a restaurant's clear, blatant error. My friends and I were so stunned that none of us finished our plates and I was too appalled to touch my pasta. A different waitress cleared our plates and we told her what the previous waitress had said to me. She nodded her head and profusely apologized for what had occurred - finally some seemingly decent customer service, we thought. She told us that my dish would not be included in the bill. Sure enough, she returned and placed the bill on our table and she neglected to remove my pasta from the total. We flagged down a different waitress and told her that our previous waitress informed us that my dish would not be included in the bill. Conveniently, with this waitress, there was a clear language barrier and she did not fully understand the situation...
In the end, we all just wanted to GET OUT of this place, so we disapprovingly paid for my uneaten dish.
After reading other postings on this page, I see now that I am not the only one who received insultingly poor service at SimBIOsi. I hope that they see this review and make the necessary changes that need to be done in regard to their customer service (or lack thereof.) In the end, none of us will ever be returning to SimBIOsi and I will be sure to warn any friends upon their future trips to Florence after this horribly unforgettable experience. read more