Involtini Italian cuisine — Restaurant in Hong Kong Island

We booked a month in advance to make sure we got a table. We booked this place because it’s known for its pasta and we came today for their pasta. (This place is not packed at all today (a weeknight). Only 4 tables were seated by 6:30pm.)

Unfortunately, we left puzzled because we don’t understand where the hype came from.

I hope my review could help the restaurant improve customers’ dining experience.

Pasta quality There’s a difference between hard pasta and al dente pasta. The pasta here is not al dente. It’s plain. There’s no special quality in the pasta. If you have flour, eggs, and a stand mixer, you could make better pasta than you have here. BUT… why do they have subpar pasta quality? As the chef was preparing for a dish, I saw him single-handedly picking up a pasta sheet and inserting it to the pasta cutting machine. I suspect that the freezing of the pasta sheet causes the escape of water from the sheet. Anyways, the pasta definitely needs improvement.

Bread (for appetizer) It’s complimentary and I would suggest them either make the bread better and charge customers OR just don’t offer it to customers at all. The cheese spread is delicious but the bread is quite disappointing.

Use of Spices We love the sauces prepared for each dish. They are rich and balanced. The problem is that they are not bold enough on the spices. This creates a mismatch between my taste buds and my nose. It paints a picture that half of it is missing.

Ambience: Music Why am I listening to Taylor Swift when I am eating Italian dish? It’s an Italian restaurant, not a coffee shop. Operate it like an Italian restaurant. A restaurant is not only about the food. It’s the entire experience at...

Tried the tasting menu (HKD568 +10% service charge - good price consider the location). Everything was great except the meat / fish dish. The salad was "just" tomatoes. I am not a big fan of tomatoes but amazingly every pieces of tomatoes tasted slight different yet all refreshing and nice. The seafood soup was very rich in flavour though the presentation was so-so. The 2 pasta dishes were definitely one of the best in town, you can tell that it's handmade and freshly made, just lovely. And the meat (one was slow cook pork and the other was slow cook pigeon breast - the latter was especially amazing!) and sauce coming with the pasta was superb too. However, the meat dish was like coming from a different planet. The wagyu meat ball was hard and tasteless. The fish was better but it qas like coming from a Thai restaurant and felt random. The gelato luckily saved the ending - very rich chocolate or very refreshing passion fruit. On the other stuff: wine was overpriced and limited in selection so decided to pay corkage of HKD200 to open our own bottle; Service was excellent, all the staff was nice; The setting was a bit average (typical packed HK style) and it's a long wait for the lift. But all in all I would definitely recommend going there...

Tldr: I’d much rather go to Carbone or Fini’s with this lunch menu price. One star only the waitress who came up to check on us, otherwise zero.

I went there for my boyfriend’s birthday celebration, which they apparently forgot about the birthday message on the dessert until after I asked. (Ironically, the couple next to us was served with birthday dessert just fine).

I’ve ordered the Hand Made Crab Roe Tortellini with Japanese Clams, which was a massive let down,. The tortellini were way too salty and smelled fishy (literally), though on the bright side, the fillings were quite full so it’s good for people who enjoys the notorious odour at Wing Lok Street. The tortellini were wrapped in thick, firm dough, which I was hoping to be served with at least some sauce or broth. That perhaps explained why there were about merely 10 tortellini with shredded broccoli stems and weeny clams, as you do grit your teeth through each (which also exacerbated how the fishy taste lingered in my mouth - an abomination to my tastebuds that did not worth 30 quids)....