Sabatino's Ristorante is located in the Crenshaw Corners Shopping Center in Wake Forest; it serves…read moreNorthern Italian food and pizza.
The restaurant space inside was much larger than I expected, and I was told upon entering that I could seat myself. I was initially the only customer in the entire restaurant, but as new customers arrived, the waitress seated them near me instead of providing space between customers. The layout features an outside covered patio, two distinct inside dining sections, and a bar area. I chose to sit in the room with the painted wall mural because it featured a television playing relaxing images. Unfortunately, that screen timed out right around the time my food arrived and was never fixed while I was there. The background music also cut out a few times, though staff eventually turned it back on. The health score was just a 92, so lower than places I'd normally dine.
For lunch, I was given both the lunch and wine menus, but my waitress let me know I could also order from the main dinner menu. I decided to order the Prosciutto & Fig Pizza, which took longer than expected to get to my table. My waitress was friendly, but she wasn't the most attentive. She appeared to be the only server working all the tables and seemed a little overwhelmed; it would have helped if she had multitasked a little.
While my iced tea was refilled once, it took far too long to get a simple to-go box at the end of the meal. When she finally brought it out, she told me she'd be right back with the check; however, since they use handheld digital payment devices, she could have easily taken care of the transaction when she dropped off the box. Things definitely could have run much smoother, and I was disappointed that I was never even asked if I wanted to order dessert.
On a positive note, I thoroughly enjoyed the actual pizza. It featured great flavors with a sweet fig base, mozzarella, prosciutto, fresh arugula, and a balsamic glaze drizzled on top. My only critique is that the prosciutto pieces should have been cut much smaller so they stayed securely on the slice, or the meat needed to be cooked slightly into the cheese to melt it in place. The flavors themselves were very good, even if the service and atmosphere left a lot of room for improvement.
