Ristorante il Siciliano - Flamingo — Restaurant in Helsinki sub-region

I don’t remember if I’ve ever left 1 star review before, but this time I have no choice. Everyone in the restaurant was nice and service was fine , we had no complaints there. We had just been to the nearby spa and hungry and we were looking for something to eat. The mall seemed to only have chain restaurants and not having any experience with any of them we blindly picked Il Siciliano. I’m not a big fan of chain restaurants, but hey - how bad could it be? We had bruschetta as a starter and the portion looked good. Fresh Rocket leaves on top of crushed tomatoes and capers with plenty of grated parmesan cheese. However, when eagerly biting in to one, it was cold stale bread. Seriously. It tasted like couple of days old bread, not grilled, not toasted but cold. For the main I had a pizza and hubby had cannelloni. Hubby’s meal was edible, cannellonis had a ricotta cheese filling and everything was covered with creamy tomato sauce. You know, the type you automatically want to scoop up with a piece of bread… except we had no bread (Italian restaurant that doesn’t serve bread?), so we had to ask for some. I, on the other hand, had a pizza. It sounded good with salami, sun-dried tomatoes, fresh rocket leaves and chili. I couldn’t finish the thing. It was super greasy. Sure salami can be greasy but this one was soaked. The thing that made it inedible was the crust. It tasted like I imagine grocery store frozen pizza bottom might and it was thick (not pan pizza thick though) and chevy. Arduous to cut with a knife. I usually love my pizza crust, even the average ones but this was nowhere near anything I could even imagine. Maybe it was microwaved? Yes, I'm serious. After our meal I commented over my barely eaten pizza that unfortunately the pizza wasn’t really edible. The waiter was sympathetic and told me he’ll let the chef know, but that was it. This pizza was 15€. Do me a favour, eat...

First the good things and the most important things: +The food (tortellinis with reindeer minced meat sauce) was good

Then to the things that had room to improve. First I didn't think too much of it but after noticing that few details were off you started seeing them everywhere.

Not sure if I would have ordered anything to drink right from the start but it would have been nice if the waiter would have asked. Not asking is bad business anyway. Could not get dish recommendations even when we tried to really dig into it. "They are all equally good" The price point of the restaurant kind of indicates that you are going to have an Italian experience with Italian food. I kind of expected Italian food to have parmesan or similar hard cheese on top of the pasta dishes. Or even better if it would have been graded onto the plate in the table. Nope. No cheese. At this point you see just every detail that is not right. For example; even the Napkins were fot different restaurant Water was poured to our glasses without asking and there was a charge of it in the end. And it all probably would have been fine but these things need to be informed right from the start. It's all about managing customers expectations.

Over all I felt like there had been too much cost cuttings which affected the whole experience. And the water thing was border line hustling. At least the food was pretty good but you come to restaurant for the experience, not just...

We went to this restaurant after a long time and decided to give the restaurant one more try (as the previous 2 times were big disappointments). We should have not done that... Even if the atmosphere and the service by default is nice, the food quality is horrible and absolutely over priced compared to the quality. Pizzas (PIZZADIPARMA 19,50€) were tasteless and had really little toppings. The fish (SALMONE ALLA SICILIANA 200gr L,G 27,90€) was also dry and tasteless like it had been taking from the freezer and heated up.

Service was nice until we mentioned about the bad quality, then the waitress started to argue about the quality and just had the full bill brought to us by another person. So giving the feedback then here. Based on these feedbacks here I can now see we're not the only one avoiding this place in the future.

After trying the place 3 times now... Still disappoint... I would recommend going to Classic Pizza on the other side of the shopping center. MUCH better...