Passeggiata — Restaurant in Sydney

I’ve been meaning to post my review for a few months now. We went to dine at Passegiata in December 2022 - as a celebration of our engagement. As locals in Waverley, we had been watching this restaurant develop over the last 12 months and had really been looking forward to the opening, as a nice upmarket local Italian restaurant. But unfortunately the first time we went, will probably be the last. The food was excellent, but the service was horrendous, and for the overall experience this place is overpriced. Setting the scene: We were sat at a table next to entrance that had shared bench seating along the wall. The restaurant looks nice, nice furniture and finishings. Once we ordered our food and entrees were served, the chef made rounds in the restaurant and started sitting on the bench next to us, sitting on my partners phone and keys without apologising and making conversation with the guests sitting next to us. It felt a little intrusive of our personal space - even if he didn’t speak to us - he was very close to us and it was quite disturbing. As we finished our entrees, the dishes weren’t cleared for a long time, and even when the main was served, the dirty dishes were still on the table. This resulted into a messy situation whereby the waitress had to go place our main dishes on the counter and clear our table before serving us our main dishes. This made us feel really awkward. I wasn‘t given new cutlery and it took the waitress probably 5 min to go fetch some after my main dish was already served and sitting in front of me. At the end we just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. Luckily we had a beautiful day celebrating our recent engagement with other activities and didn’t let this experience ruin our...

Disgusting experience. Partner is gluten free and booked their Valentine's menu clearly stipulating she needed a gluten free option only for her upon booking. She then reconfirmed this with the wait staff to which was advised that's totally fine. Booked set menu..When ordering ..staff had absolutely no idea what on the menu was gluten free and had to keep checking with the chef. Menu items that came clearly weren't gluten free but reassured it was. Was then told it's not gluten free to then only be told it was...again...only after it came out. Ordered wine only to be asked 3 more times if we wanted wine...but still hasn't received after 20+ mins whilst food was getting cold. Partner was left not eating half the menu items thinking they either werent gluten free but was. Or wasn't gluten free but then had to eat around it and will possibly be sick. Icing on the cake? Owner came out aggressively asking what the issue was..walked away and then slammed a menu on the table with some ticked items with no explanation whatsoever. Also seemed to be intoxicated and wanted a confrontation Too late since we already went through a disgusting experience. $240 for food absolutely sub par. I live in Randwick and will absolutely ask everyone I know to avoid and recommend those reading...

My wife & I largely enjoyed our dining experience although having booked a week earlier, we were disappointed to be seated at the bar. The restaurant was also full and quite noisy so we felt it would benefit from some acoustic dampening. However we settled in and began to enjoy the buzz and the seating position. The custom, daily menu gave no indication of entree Vs main, but we deduced from descriptions & ingedients the likely transition point on the page between the two. That said, the portion sizes aren’t large, so be prepared to order more than what you’d think you’ll need. The food was excellent; well-balanced flavours and textures, and a wonderful delicacy to each dish, though for the price we were expecting this. One parting note is that I‘ve hit the new year with a desire to drink less, so I was pleased to be able to enjoy a non-alcoholic, local beer. However it was a surpise to be charged the same price as their fully imported, alcoholic counterpart. Not cool. Overall we enjoyed our evening and will certainly be back, though on balance of food, service and overall value, it won’t be as often as we’d...