Pascarella — Restaurant in Berlin

My colleague and I we came to the restaurant the 13/04/2025. My colleague - a big fan of Italy and Italian cuisine ordered pasta al tartufo, it was spectacular when being prepared before the table, but it turned out that it was soaked in alcohol. My colleague says she orders it frequently in Italy and of course a little dose of wine inside to it is ok, even if she doesn't drink alcohol at all, but she couldn't whistand so huge quantity of alcohol in the served dish and didn't eat it. In revanche she could choose another dish, so she took panna cota, while she still had to pay € 33,0 for pasta. So in my opinion a panna cotta for 33 Euro is too much. But what if a child would eat that? From my part I ordered risotto con funghi porcini. I am big fan of mashrooms and italian vegetables. What did it turn out to be? There were few worms inside the dish. The waiter said it is onion, but it had a typical shape for larva, sorry... It was not onion. He said that if I wanted to have vegan food I should check the notifications to each dish. I think other people also wouldn't like to find worms in the food whether vegetarian or not. Then I found more larva inside and returned the plate to waiter. Unfortunately I ate few bite of this dish... The waiter came back, was quite nice and said that I can order anything else from the Menu. So, I ordered the same dish and asked to serve the same but without the little worms and rather to be mushrooms with rice, many mushrooms, not rice with mushrooms. Finally I received the rice and some mushrooms inside. However I was disgusted and ate some of this rice in searching for mushrooms. The taste was standard for rice with cream. I ordered also seperately standard mushrooms and mixed leaf salad on the side and these were ok. Summing up we had no compensation for these dishes, which were beyond criticism. I can...

Unfortunately, if you are Italian and go in an Italian restaurant abroad, you always carry that load of stubbornness that makes you see everything in a bad way :) however I decided to leave away that feeling and be objective.

Anyway, there are some things that most Italian restaurants should know and Pascarella does not yet:

Pasta has to be "al dente". Never, never, never even slightly damn overcooked A "Focaccia tomato and mozzarella" is a focaccia with tomato and mozzarella. No cheese, otherwise we expect "al formaggio". But if you combine mozzarella and cheese, then be careful. Here we didn't understand what cheese it was, didn't taste neither Parmigiano nor Grana nor even Bella Lodi. Tuna steak is not served with wakame seaweed and soy sauce: that's what you get in a Japanese restaurant. You could serve it with pistachio sauce, for instance, and give it a Sicilian taste. But you don't have to go that far to be creative. This is even truer if you make it pay 30 euros, a price which kind of creates expectations. Wine glasses at 10 euros are overpriced, unless you are serving something special. A standard Montepulciano or Sauvignon can cost 10 euros in Moscow due to export and transportation costs, but with all the Italian food importers in Germany it is kind of expensive. The serving experience itself was poor, with no one suggesting wines and the waiter telling nothing about what he was pouring in the glass. Service: we have been waiting for 1 hour and 10 minutes to get this overpriced food. It felt like we had been forgotten by the staff for ages. Usually when this happens in Italy you get at least free coffee, not a pushy...

Stayed at Titanic Chausseestrasse for Christmas and booked a table for 2 persons on Christmas day for 1pm -however, as we had a trip to the Bundestag booked for 3pm we decided to change our meal to later. There was no-one available at the restaurant around 11am to speak to to change but the waitress in the bar informed us that the restaurant doesn't open until 4pm!!!! Not happy at this point thinking we had nothing booked for Christmas Dinner. We managed to eventually book later for 7pm. The service was slow despite not being overly busy. Starter was a bruschetta type thing (a buratino) the "bread" was rock hard and I had difficulty cutting it with my knife - it more or less broke off - like a piece of toffee - the rest of it was quite bland. At €18.50 it was overly priced (imo). Main meal took another half hour to arrive. We had the overpriced (it was Christmas after all) duck and fillet of beef. Both mine and my partners potatoes/vegetables were cold. All in all £150 for a 2 course meal for 2 - you would have expected better. Edit: On reflection, whilst the restaurant were happy enough to slip an overly priced "Christmas" menu on top of regular menu (mostly same food) there wasn't as much as piece of tinsel...