Bellucci Cucina — Restaurant in Sydney

I eat out a lot and I naively thought we didn't have bad restaurants in Sydney, until I ate at Bellucci Cucina. I cannot reconcile my experience with the positive reviews it has received. Because of this I am going to provide as much detail as I can on my experience.

Service In short there wasn't any.

Even though I had a booking no attempt had been made to create a seating plan and so the waitress appeared to be at a complete loss as to where to seat us. Eventually she settled on the only table which hadn't been cleaned / set. I think OK it's only a few minutes wait, doesn't matter.

I was handed a menu when I sat down after which no one came near our table for more than 25 minutes. Eventually we were able to waive someone over and asked for some water and a bottle of wine. The waitress came back about 5 minutes later with 2 wine glasses and then 5 minutes after that with the bottle of wine. We asked again about the water. We were given two glasses of room temperature water. My friend drank hers straight away and we spent the next 10 minutes trying to attract someone's attention to get some more water and order our food.

When the waitress eventually came over we asked would it be possible to get a jug / bottle bottle of tap water as we were thirsty and were told not unless we wanted to buy a bottle, they couldn't give us a bottle of tap water. I asked would it be possible to get cold water rather than room temperature and was told only if you buy a bottle.

At no stage did anyone come over to ask us how the meals were. At the end of the night when we had finished our meals, no one came near us to either clear the table or ask if we wanted dessert, coffee or anything else. After 30 minutes we gave up and decided we would rather go somewhere else for dessert. Of course we couldn't find anyone to ask to bring the bill so we had to go to the counter and wait for someone to eventually notice us so we could pay the bill.

Atmosphere We had booked on a Saturday night. Australia Square is very soulless on a Saturday night because everything is closed so you are effectively looking out over an empty concrete space. Perhaps it's more lively during the week, I definitely wouldn't recommend it on the weekend.

Food We didn't order an entree because although we wanted to try some of the proscuitto / salami and were going to order it with the "wood fired bread" but luckily enough the table next to us had ordered it and we could see it was effectively a full sized pizza base with no toppings and not bread at all.

I didn't think it was possible to get pasta so wrong. My friend ordered the gin rigatoni. It came out with chilli flakes all over it and sprinkled all around the edge of the plate (the menu made no mention of chilli). At first she was horrified at the amount of chilli but then having tasted the meal she decided the chilli was the only thing in the dish that had any flavour. Her portion size was so small that after we left we had to go to another restaurant and order an antipasto plate because she was still hungry.

I ordered the sausage and porcini pasta, a dish I've had numerous times in Italian restaurants and regularly cook myself at home. There was no sausage, but some sort of shredded meat which had a terrible taste. It tasted so little like sausage and porcini that I had to ask the waitress to check whether I had been given the wrong meal by mistake. When I explained that there was no sausage in it she took the plate away and came back about 5-10 minutes later said it's the right dish they've put some more of the ragu on it for you. By this time the meal was cold and adding more of the strange tasting ragu didn't help so I ended up leaving quite a lot of it. My friend was so hungry she asked to try my leftovers but said it was so awful she couldn't eat it no matter how hungry she was.

Overall the worst experience I've had in a restaurant in Sydney in the...

Food was okay, however service was horrible.

Our pizza was soggy, most likely from the tomato. The spaghetti was quite tough to chew and a little bit undercooked. The meatball and squid were decent. The fact that my sisters favourite part of the meal was the fries and it’s aioli sauce just summarises how the food is.

Cocktails were amazing and the server that made and brought us the cocktails was lovely! He served us with a smile and made us feel welcomed.

However, I cannot say the same with the other waiter that served us that night. The lack of customer service provided by this waiter, accompanied by his blunt attitude completely ruined our night. My sister rushed to meet us at our table and had forgotten to scan the QR code by the entry due to the hurry. As there was no staff at the entry for assistance, she walked in to find our table. The tall bald waiter rudely confronted her and said “are you just going to walk in and not sign in?” in a rude tone of voice. He could have easily approached her and said “excuse me, could you please sign in before entering”. The rudeness and attitude just seemed unnecessary.

Another incident was when we were taking photos around the table. This same waiter decided to approach us and said “guys, it’s time to eat. Food will get cold”. Mind you, it’s not like we took 15 mins to even take photos. We spent 5 minutes to talk and take photos before started eating our meals.

He also gave our bills at 8pm to our table, right after we had finished our mains, claiming that he has to close the registers. He didn’t even bother checking if we needed anything else, like dessert or more drinks. Our booking was at 6.30pm so it did feel like he was attempting to kick us out, especially since the opening hours was until 11pm and the restaurant only had 3 other tables of customers. We also noticed he continued to take drink and dessert orders from other tables, which clearly contradicts with his lie of needing to close the registers.

Overall, we had a negative experience at this place, despite receiving 30% off food from the Fork. We could have easily spent $140 elsewhere where we can feel like...

So me and my friends paid for the $99 bottomless package and there was one HUGE issue at this restaraunt.

There is only ONE disabled bathroom to service everyone in the entire restaurant. I honestly found this abhorrent for an establishment with a bar. There was a constant line to go to the one bathroom that’s also shared between other patrons of the building. Honestly not good enough and the bathroom was disgusting.

The food was okay. We may have chosen the wrong options so definitely do some research first.

The service regarding the drinks for bottomless was terrible. The staff took so long to get drink orders to us often coming back with less drinks than asked for. Half an hour before our booking ended we asked for a round of mimosas and 15 minutes after the order was placed we had the manager come to our table to tell us our order has been cancelled as the bar was closed for the night. We weren’t advised that we were being too rowdy or being cut off or anything just a really stupid excuse.

Not sure if the drink service is regularly bad, the tables around us didn’t seem to be having as hard of a time to get their drinks compared to us. We think it may have been because we were a table of women of colour and that they thought we were more drunk than we were because we were celebrating a birthday party and there was a lot of chatter and animated characters on the table. We only came to this conclusion after receiving no real communication about why our drinks were taking longer than everyone else’s. The staff brushed us off everytime we asked for updates or why it’s taking so long for our drinks to come out so we assume they were trying to space it out for us.

All in all pretty disappointing considering the fact our table paid almost $900 for the evening. We got 3 pizzas 3 pastas and an antipasto table as well as terrible drink service all night with no proper bathroom for patrons. I’d suggest you spend your money...