Restaurant Locanda Scappi — Restaurant in Helsinki sub-region

Meh.

Everything was just ok.

Service was courteous and pleasant, although there were zero attempts to guide us thru anything about our experience. The Italian waiter couldn’t understand me when I was ordering food + drinks.

What irritates me is the wine situation. We ordered our wine and we could not get half glasses of certain wines as the waiter conveyed to us (we wanted 6 cl or 8cl of Franciacorta so we could share a full bottle after starters. “No, only 12 cl.” Fine. 😐🙄)

So when we ordered our glasses of 16cl for our pasta/risotto, we got 12cl. The host brought over our wine and I mentioned to him it was not 16cl. He said it was 12cl at first bc the waiter ordered us 12cl I told him we ordered 16cl. The pours for an Italian restaurant were “very Finnish.”

23 euros for a strict pour of 16cl Nebbiolo, FYI.

I get it: margins are slim, Finnish people are the worst and rudest guests to deal with, and my tepid review is not helping the cause.

It would be nice to have details noticed better + handled and not experienced as roadblocks.

Candles at the tables were nice but ours was blown out before we got to our table and no effort was made to light it.

They gave us limoncello shots with the bill, nice but not my thing.

The espresso is horrible, the cod looked lovely but was under cooked, and all the while I kept feeling we were one step away from being offered Peroni’s and someone sitting next us who either would breastfeed their child while sipping Vanilla Roibus or someone who listens to their WhatsApp voice messages on speaker without headphones.

The carbonara was a bit undercooked but the sauce was lovely though. And the fried cheese was good but you really cannot mess that...

A series of diminishing disappointments.

Entering, the decor is that of a posher end of breakfast rooms in fashionable self-service hostels. Which I guess it is. As style goes, clean, tasteful, impersonal, very hard to associate with nonna's cooking.

Menu looks like an intriguing twist on casalinga from the South but already the starter just did not work in practice. Good burrata was totally swamped by chilli and mint. Aubergine felt like it was from another time, place and dish.

For secondi, we chose the classic melanzane alla parmigiana and their pork's neck braciole. The melanzane was goodish, but very timid in taste and size. In a top end restaurant with 8 course menus this might pass for a nice palate reliever, but as a main this makes you think of where you really want to eat today, and what this really tastes like in Italy. The braciole was home cooking in the random sense. The ragù was made of bland tomatoes with no basil, balsamico or sugar I could detect. Overuse of salt merely overemphasized the acidic notes. The potatoes were without any particular point besides too lightweight rosemary flavoring. And the pork? Nondescript.

The nadir of disappointments arrived along with the over-the-top-for-quality bill. In the form of ersatz espresso. Finnish lump sugar of twice the volume of coffee.. and the coffee was the dregs of something bitter. Is the restaurant Turkish? Then I...

We had the opportunity for an early light dinner and headed to Locanda. Thursday before easter and the hall was suprisingly busy at 5 pm. The dining hall itself is mostly comfortable, but I can imagine that the industrial-styled piping that runs above the whole hall is not to everybody's taste. Some nice prosecco and lovely foccacia, while waiting for the appetisers. Aubergine Caponata had wonderful flavors and the dish was just as I imagined it to be. Suppli funghi e mozzarelle was spot-on perfect. Crunchy and gooey, risotto inside had still some aldente on it and everything here worked together nicely. The entrees on the otherhand was a bit of a let down. The menu itself was somehow unclear on the fact, that if you order something from the grilled & braised -list, there are very little or none sides to it, you should order them separately. Sadly our waiter (who was great apart from this) didn't mention this either, so we ended up eating the entrees, as they were served. Anyway, both the Costina di Manzo and Agnello Cacio e ´Ova, had very nice flavors and we enjoyed them. Overall it was a good experience with good food. Easily reached and lots of parking around...