Piccoli Cugini — Restaurant in Paris

First I would like to state: I have been working in the F&B (Restaurants, Hotels, Cruise ships) all my adult life - nearly 40years, but time to time I like to be a client too! :) My wife and I arrived at 19:30 to the restaurant and set down at the terrace. At this time there were 2 other couples on the terrace and maybe 2-3 tables inside and one person sitting at the bar. The 2 person working at the service noticed us and in a few minutes the gentlemen gave us the menu card. And from here just all went downhill: he started to chat with the other couples, then some people came to pick-up the take-out food they ordered and our serveur he was talking with them for long minutes when finally the the other serveur the young lady send him over to take our order. He took the order then he went back to talk with the people at the bar. My wife she went to the toilet, she came back in 5 minutes and we still didn't have our drinks. Our serveur was not bothered by us but neither by the kitchen staff or by his college. Again the young lady pushed him to take care of us...he came back again to asked us for the second time what we had ordered. We patiently repeated hoping that after 15 minutes we finally going to get something. - for a moment I was thinking to help myself with service as we were seating 2 meters away from the bar. Another 5 minutes later the serveur came back to us this time with the cutlery and napkins and again asked us what we had ordered! In the same time a party of 3 arrived next to us, the young lady took they order and served them with drinks in few minutes, and when she was sending that order to the kitchen I couldn't help overhearing her, when she was saying to the man "you forgot to send the order of that couple" -I figured it was us! And he came back the 4th time to ask us what had we ordered - although our order was 2 drinks and 2 pizzas...This time my wife she looked at him and said calmly: you know what, it's 20:10, for 40 minutes we didn't get anything, just forget about it, we are leaving! This didn't seem to bother the staff either. We walked just randomly about 10-15 minutes and we ended up at a small restaurant behind the Place Republic named after the owner (who actually served us) where we had a greeting in the first minute by Marcela herself, she took our order at once, and everything went as it should, so I will leave a review at her profile of course. Now as I wrote at the beginning, being in the same industry I can understand a lot of things, but what happened to us at Piccoli just felt like we were filmed for some prank or gag...

If it were possible, I would give this restaurant no stars. My boyfriend and I decided to have dinner there, and it was a horrible experience. It was the worst service I've ever encountered in Paris. As soon as we arrived, they didn't even give us the option of choosing where to sit. The whole terrace was empty, yet they seated us right next to a couple of girls who were eating. We were so close that we were touching their shoulders just by grabbing the menus. As if that wasn't bad enough, we ordered an entree, a pizza, and a pasta. An hour passed, and nothing arrived, not even water. We saw the whole section of the restaurant eating, paying, and even new customers arriving. A group of six guys had all received their pizzas even though we had been waiting for an hour already. We asked multiple times about our order, but the waiter was incompetent and forgot our orders. After an hour and 20 minutes seated, we finally received our entree, which was some fried mozzarella balls - good but nothing extraordinary. Thirty to forty minutes passed again with no sign of our pasta or pizza. When we asked about it for the third time, they informed us that they couldn't make the carbonara pasta, even though we had seen everyone around us eating it. Two hours later, we received an okay salmon pizza and decided to get the bill. After everything, the waiter didn't apologize, no one seemed to care, and it was amusing how every customer saw our experience and even reacted as we were sitting there for more than two hours while enduring the worst customer service for some friend cheeses and a cheap salmon pizza. I would not recommend this restaurant. Take into account that my partner is French, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's even worse for tourists. Stay away from here; you are better off grabbing some pizzas at Monoprix - less expensive, and chances are they will...

This place is SUPER. I traveled throughout Europe by myself for 5 weeks and the ice cream here was by far the best if not one of the top 3 that I had. That's saying a lot considering I had ice cream or gelato almost every day while traveling. I stayed in Le Marais and walked over to Berthillon everyday! So convenient. Upon starting my new job my coworkers asked me about Paris and they asked if I went to Berthillon and if I had the wild strawberry flavor. Yes and yes :) Yep this place has a cult like following! So DO NOT miss this place when you get to Paris!!! The ice cream is bursting of natural flavor. I think about this place pretty much every time the topic of ice cream comes up. It is that good. It is also close walking distance from gorgeous Notre Dame which is a not to be...