Magnone's Italian Kitchen — Restaurant in The Blue Mountains

I am honestly shocked by these high reviews…. We had a horrible experience in every aspect (food, service, timeliness) and will never be back. We chose this restaurant based on the Google rating, but boy the bar is low in Blue Mountain. Our main issue was with the service however our food also had several huge problems - 2 out of 4 dishes were completely inedible, no exaggeration.

EDIT: Upon further investigation, we’ve discovered that most of the recent five star reviews are fake. They seem to be posted by bots programmed to mention the name Selwyn. Several of the reviews literally just say the word “Selwyn,” that’s all.

First, we got the beet salad and the nuts were extremely rancid. Like seriously, seriously rancid, left a horrible taste in the mouth afterwords, totally inedible. We couldn’t eat it.

Then our main courses come, and we’re waiting for 1 of the 3 dishes. Waiter comes out after 5+ min to say it’ll be another 1 minute, and she didn’t put the order in. It took around 20min while the rest of us had to start eating and one person had to just sit there watching. Waiter was not apologetic at all, literally brought out the food with a casual “here’s your pasta” once one of us was already done eating and didn’t even apologize or acknowledge the wait and mistake.

Meanwhile, I tasted my pizza and the dough was RAW. I am not exaggerating, I wanted to puke after one bite. Literally raw dough, you could press off a piece from the bottom and press it between your fingers to see a sticky raw dough. Nasty. I sent it back and the waiter rolled her eyes, then brought me a new one but took a full 40 min to bring it out. At this point, not only had one person (the only one with their food on time) finished her pasta but even the second delayed pasta was finished. There were several times I debated just leaving without the pizza and getting takeout for myself, but I didn’t want to be charged for a dish we didn’t receive. And from what we now know of the waitress, she definitely would have charged us.

Finally, here is the absolute kicker. They had a Negroni in their main menu for $16, and a Negroni “special” for $22. My mom wanted the cheaper one, and very clearly specified she wanted the regular one in the main menu, while pointing to that menu book. The waitress said “yes of course.” The bill came with the $22 one. When we flagged the mistake, the waitress behaved in an absolutely unacceptable fashion, literally have never experienced this in my entire life of eating at restaurants across the world. First she went to the bartender to ask what the difference was between the two Negronis. Then she came back and said the $22 one had more premium ingredients. We explained that that’s not what we ordered and she made a mistake. She said well “that’s what was served” and REFUSED to correct the bill. I literally couldn’t believe it. For a restaurant with a $200 bill ($70 per person, so not cheap) to refuse to correct a $6 charge is just unbelievable, especially considering this was the waitress’ mistake.

I truly have never experienced such bad service in my life, and this waitress should not be in the restaurant industry. We took the high road and gave a full tip, but boy this was worth asking for a manager because it was so beyond unacceptable. Safe to say, we will never be back and are considering eating our meals outside of Blue Mountain considering how horrible this place was and how high...

⸻

⭐️ If I could give 0 stars, I would.

I booked this reservation 2 weeks in advance for a girls’ trip. The website even let me request upstairs dining. Day-of, I called to ask if I could drop off a custom birthday cake early since our reservation wasn’t until 6pm. They said “yes, of course.” Great start, right? Wrong.

We arrived later, ordered bottles of wine, apps, mains — all fine until the food came out. The menu shows an option for a normal rigatoni alla vodka (non-spicy). We ordered that. What came out? 🔥 Mouth-on-fire spicy. When we asked about it, the server literally shrugged and said “it just comes like that” with zero solution. Cute.

But here’s the real kicker: I spent hours making a gorgeous custom birthday cake for my best friend. I left a candle in the box so it could be brought out properly after dinner. To our shock and horror, the server brought it out already cut into slices. WHO does that?! I asked why, and his deadpan response was, “It’s policy.” Excuse me? What policy requires you to destroy the presentation of a custom cake before we sing happy birthday and the guest of honor even sees it?

We asked for a manager. Instead, a “supervisor” appeared (apparently the manager was across the street). She offered to waive a mysterious cake cutting fee (newsflash: we were never informed of this fee to begin with 🙃). After “talking to the manager across the street” (who was apparently too busy bartending to face upset guests), she returned with the same useless offer. Meanwhile, the staff stood at the bar, literally laughing at us.

We even walked across the street ourselves to find the manager — first we were told he was there, then we were told he wasn’t, then we were told he’d left. The runaround was laughable.

✨ Long story short: • Staff are dismissive and unprofessional. • Management hides from accountability. • They ruined what should have been a special birthday celebration.

If you care about your event, your time, or your sanity: do NOT...

Had the worst experience of my entire restaurant life. Ordered an Expresso martini and was made with zero foam and tasted terrible. After only having two sips we made the waitress aware of the unsatisfactory drink. We ordered something else. We paid for food and drinks after the fact and noticed that the Expresso Martini which was taken away from us was still billed for. When spoken to our waitress she agreed we should not have to pay for it. Later she came back and said management will not take it off the bill because of the new rules. When spoken to management, the young blonde girl, the staff was laughing and making mockery over the situation. We noticed this when this was first brought up the staff was laughing and the manager did the same. She refused to take it off the bill and laughed and demanded us to leave. The manager did a terrible job in handling this situation and was extremely unprofessional. There is zero customer service skills in this restaurant and think that they are always right and act entitled. I never leave a review but this disgusting behavior warranted one. I am more than happy to pay for more drinks or anything else but to tolerate how we were treated after spending over 315 dollars at this place was beyond this world. They need to hire people that know how to serve and take care of customers this was embarrassing and disgusting all around. The manager is not equipped to handle a management role and also keep her staff in check when dealing with paying customers. Extremely rude and disrespectful and degrades the reputation of the brand. If I could leave a 0 star review I would. Funny thing is I was here back in Jan for my birthday and the service was phenomenal. Terrible place and would not recommend with the...