La Calabrese Pizzeria — Restaurant in Melbourne

My partner and I looked forward to La Calabrese opening up. There's a Domino's just a few stores down, another pizza store a few minutes walked and another just down the road. With the local established competition I expected good things but we were both generally disappointed.

Pros:

1. Quality of ingredients are good. The dough which made up my calzone was very tasty. The cheese on my calzone and my partner's pizza was also very tasty.
2. The interior of the store is very nice and has a warm cozy feel to it.

Cons:

1. While my calzone was hot, my partner's pizza was luke-warm. It was cold when she was half done.
2. Both our meals were very stingy on the cheese plus my partners was stingy on the meat.
3. My calzone was incredibly oily. Towards the middle it was a soggy mess which fall apart.
4. While the waitress ladies were uniformed nicely and overall looked the part to go along with the very nice interior of the store. Management and kitchen staff were dressed casual. Normally not an issue, but effort was put into the interior and waitress staff so why not go all the way?
5. All prior cons will be miniscule at best if it wasn't for one thing, the price. $21.50 for a meal isn't bad, if all the boxes were ticked. The price is by far the number 1 thing letting it down and preventing me from giving La Calabrese a 2nd chance any time soon. Local pizza shops are nearly a half the price. For value for money it just doesn't make sense. Once again, if the food was premium, I'll happily pay the premium price.
6. No images of the food. Among their website, Facebook and in-store menu there was no images. Not a deal breaker for the most part. But since La Calabrese likes to advertise foreign ingredients which are largely unknown to the Endeavour Hills populose which has almost exclusively had very Americanised variants of international food.

Despite an overall negative experience, I will try La Calabrese again in about 6 months time. Hopefully it's just a teething issue and the flaws can...

Our first experience and we would not go back. You don’t expect to leave an Italian restaurant hungry, but I did. We drove 40 minutes mainly to try the gnocchi in a bread bowl and it was quite nice. Gnocchi was fresh, cheesy and the pizza dough bread bowl its served in helped to make it a heartier meal but at $40 a serve its overpriced for what it is. I always look for risotto when dining Italian and was excited to see a lemon and prawn version on the menu. When they bought it out we actually laughed. It was the smallest meal I have ever been served. A big bowl but with a little puddle in the bottom that was insulting in its portion size for $38. It was only warm, not hot, so I couldn't even take my time to savour the tiny portion. The flavour was good, prawns fresh but it was so unsatisfying. We quietly asked the waitress if we were given an entree size but she confirmed that's the main meal size. She tried to sell us on some desserts. We politely declined and were going to pay and leave when the owner unexpectedly came out to speak with us. He said it was not an accident, that’s a deliberate and consistent portion they always serve consisting of 60 grams of risotto rice. Add in about 3 prawns and you can easily work out how small a meal it is. ( Actually if you google it a serving of 60gr is entree size…..) But he said their other customers don't complain about it. Clearly indicating it was us with the problem. He offered us a limoncello shot each on the house, we declined as we didn’t want anything for free, but he insisted and apologised that we were leaving unhappy but reiterated again they hadn’t done anything wrong, he believes what they offer is acceptable. And that is fine, its his business and can run it how he wants to, and we don’t have to go there again. You try things and live and learn. Melbourne is full of Italian restaurants that serve great food for much, much better value than 2 bowls of pasta and 2 soft...

A promising evening could have ended in a disaster and it was just pure luck that a trip to the emergency room was avoided. We went hoping for a nice quiet Italian dinner in Endeavour Hills (our first trip to the area). The welcome and the attentiveness of the staff was good and the food came on time and was as expected. Our youngest daughter has a severe nut allergy (anaphylaxis) and we brought that to the attention of the wait staff on multiple occasions while ordering. At the end of the meal we ordered the Tiramisu to share and once again we flagged the nut allergy at that time. When the order arrived we started eating, however luckily before my daughter took her bite she saw some green shavings on the chocolate garnish. We called the manager (owner) and he confirmed that it was pistachio that it was added as garnish by a new chef/employee in the kitchen as an experiment or to make the dish fancy, and it is normally not the practice. Though, he said sorry a couple of times the tone was more of like mistakes happen let us move on, which was a bit concerning as it raises concern whether the restaurant takes allergy management seriously or not. Also, it seemed like the new chef/employee was being made the scapegoat because it was the convenient thing to do without an acknowledgement of a lack of proper training or any breakdown in communication between the waitstaff and the kitchen.

Rest assured we will not going back here and would advise people with food allergies if they go here to ensure that they are vigilant because they definitely seem to have a laissez-faire attitude towards...