Giardinetto — Restaurant in Brisbane City

Where does one start?…… Let’s start with some context….

There are four reasons you might go out to dinner and one expectation.

Reason 1: You’re trying to escape the banality of home life Reason 2: You want to escape your teenage kids for the night Reason 3: You are out to celebrate (birthday, anniversary or promotion) Reason 4: You want a date night with your significant other

Expectation: The food is better than you can cook at home

Our reasons for going out were Reasons 2 & 4.

Now to the more interesting part of the review…my wife and I had probably 40 different restaurants to choose from for dinner… but we chose Giardinetto because it had pretty good reviews, it had been around since 1966 and it had a cool looking vibe from the street. I have to admit this these were false assumptions on my part….. in fact by the time I left I had a severe case of cognitive dissonance. This was due to the chasm between the reviews I was reading and what was entering my mouth.

Entree was calamari. Now anyone that has eaten good calamari will tell you is that it should be tender and seasoned. This dish was neither. It was tough, had zero flavour and tasted like it was frozen. When the wait staff asked me whether I was happy with the dish, I gave her the the feedback I’m writing here. Her response was less than helpful saying, “People complain about it… but they still eat it”…. Not what I expected but it gave an insight into the overall dining experience. I maintained a positive outlook that the scaloppine and prawns would save the night….

Unfortunately I was disappointed… again. The veal was pretty tasteless and drowned in a sauce that resembled some sweet creamy infusion that you’d find on a P&O cruise experimental cocktail. The prawns however were plentiful, flavor some and not cooked to within an inch of their lives. I should have asked for a plate of prawns sans the veal and sauce. The small bowl of vegetables were delivered by the wait staff with their fingers in the bowl. The two small florettes of broccoli were passable. The beans, overcooked, and the carrots resembled something that had been run over by a bus going down Brunswick Street, mushy, watery and misshapen.

The wait staff overall lacked any interest in their job. For example, we ordered a bottle of wine and they delivered the bottle and two glasses. They didn’t pour us wine, which I would expect as basic service.

The parmesan cheese…. Was dry and largely tasteless. I suspect it came from a packet.

I am pretty easy to please…. Good good and good service. Unfortunately we lucked out on both. I have been fortunate to eat Italian food all over the world and it is safe to say that Italian food is largely simple ingredients, cooked well.

Now doubling back to my one expectation….the food should be better than you can make yourself. I can safely say my wife, and a close Italian friend of mine cooks Italian food WAY better than what I was served tonight, and my step son would have given WAY better service. A frozen Mama Fiorelli TV dinner would have rated better…..at a fraction of the price.

Apart from the prawns, the bottle of Italian Sangiovese was more than passable.

I know this may be a shock review, but I cannot believe the rave reviews online…… hence the cognitive dissonance. I can only assume those that gave 5-star reviews have never eaten real Italian bistro food. Sorry…. Life is short and I won’t...

Italian. When someone tells you that you are eating at an Italian restaurant, one will normally associate it with Pasta, Pizza, boisterous singing from the kitchen, wine and loads of Parmesan.  For me, I just thought “oh heck, this is going to be carb overload”. Don’t get me wrong.  I love carbs.  Carbs have helped me weather many an emotional storm over the years (sexist generalisation alert – if I was a chick, I’d be that chick that sits on the couch sobbing into a tub of icecream surrounded by empty bags of chips after my boyfriend broke up with me), so I get the appeal behind Italian food.

Enter Giardinetto

Strategically located in the Valley – just across the road from OMFG (review to come kidding honey), one can find this quaint little restaurant ready to warm up your hearts and fill up your tummies. While the decor is fairly plain (no gigantic Italian frieze occupying whole walls and no creeping ivy), but with plenty of historic looking memorablia, it is easily forgiven.  Having been around since 1966, you know that food must be better than passable (as the discerning palates of todays generation would be more than likely to slam a restaurant with negative reviews if they felt their food was not to their liking).

The Menu

No fancy menu here.  Who needs a leatherbound menu with embossed logos?  Who needs a gold trimmed menu displaying delicately scripted items?  Printed documents that show they have been handled by many, many, many patrons….that’s where it’s at. The standard fare applies here – Pasta, Pizza, Rissotto, but where the…..well, awesomeness lies, in the fact that not only can you adapt and change the menu to suit your own palate or dietary requirements, the delightful waitress even seemed to recommend it.  Certain vegetables included? sure. Certain items excluded? sure. Extra chicken? Sure.  Do you want Carbonara with a hint of Nepolitana? sure….she’ll probably look at you funny, but you can get it.

Big Ass Servings

I didn’t finish my dish.  I fell like a failure.  I feel like every mountaineer that approached Everest before Hillary got all Kiwi and smashed his way to the top.  I was defeated. Essentially, my Carbonara (sans Nepolitana – I’m not that adventurous) came out in a bowl that I feel resembled a cauldron in size.  Heaped with twirls of fettucine and succulent looking bacon and chicken, I threw on some parmesan, let it melt and tucked in with gusto.  The pasta was cooked perfectly (I didn’t pull a strand out to throw at a wall to test, but it felt perfectly cooked in my mouth) and with plenty of sauce and delicious meat I couldn’t go wrong. Plenty of smiles around the table as some of the other diners dived into their seafood pizza, their vegetarian pasta or their mushroom rissotto and safe to say, we were all happy with our meals. With plenty of foot traffic from the Valley nightlife, this restaurant is seemingly quite busy, so I would suggest booking ahead if you were looking for an Italian Carb loading session.  We will be...

We are baffled by the positive reviews of the restaurant. While at first glance the decor harkens back to a feeling of a quaint Italian bistro, we sat down and noticed that all of the paintings on the wall were crooked. That should have been the first 'tell' that this restaurant is no longer run by people who have a sense of pride in their offering, but are rather resting on the laurels of past (perhaps deserved) accolades.

The next red flag was the waitress' inability to recommend menu items, with a comment that the only difference between the carbonara and the Alfredo being mushrooms (which don't belong in Alfredo but I digress). We had the calamari, which my husband said was the worst he'd eaten in 20 years. We were starving, we ate it, despite it being overcooked, under seasoned, and served with a decidedly not Italian mayo-based concoction.

I had the carbonara, my husband had scallopini with prawns. Once I poured a generous amount of powdered cheese and salt on the pasta, it was somewhat edible (which should give a sense of what we were dealing with), but nowhere near a traditional carbonara, with chunks of crunchy onions (as in undercooked) dispersed throughout. The scallopine was like a sponge, drowning in what we can only imagine was the 'chef's' spin on a cream sauce. The side of veggies were basically carrots and green beans nuked or boiled to ensure any flavour was removed, exacerbated by zero butter or olive oil, let alone salt or pepper.

There was also a distinct lack of pride in the appearance of the staff, but that wouldn't have really mattered if the food was in any way good.

We won't be returning, but we instead will remember it as our own version of being in a 'before' episode of Kitchen Nightmares.

I have only ever once before posted a negative review, and am only posting here to both encourage the owners and staff to step up their game, and to discourage patrons from wasting money on food that tasted worse than meals from the shops that you could pop into the microwave until owners decided to actually care again about the quality of food, atmosphere snd service that they...