RE Cucina Bar — Restaurant in Berlin

I think this place needs a change in art direction and pricing. From an Italian perspective, I can say that the food was okay, but nothing special. Let me break it down from the start.

We arrived at 8 pm, and the place was almost empty, which I thought was nice; it felt like having a private dinner. We ordered wine and water, but the waitress forgot to bring the water. The bottle was just sitting on the counter. She seemed more focused on cleaning and managing the empty space than taking care of the guests. I could understand if the place was full, but with an empty restaurant on a Saturday evening, it was disappointing. So I had to remind her our water.

We ordered appetizers and pasta afterwards. The appetizers arrived after 30 minutes – super salty sardines and a polenta crostino with fontina and mortadella. The waitress was supposed to bring us new cutlery, but she forgot again, as she was too busy cleaning and counting money. The pasta came after 15 minutes. I ordered tagliolini alla norcina, which were okay and the pasta was fresh. However, the taglioni from my partner were underwhelming and tasteless. We were still very hungry, which is unusual for me after an appetizer and a plate of pasta, so we ordered a cannolo each.

When we asked for the bill, we were surprised to find out they don’t accept card payments. This information should be clearly communicated, either at the entrance or in advance. My partner had to go get cash, which was uncomfortable. Paying 100 euros for a dinner that felt worth only half the price was disappointing. Honestly, there are many nice Italian places in Berlin with the same quality or even better food, and they are way cheaper with friendlier staff and less pretentious atmosphere. I suggest you take inspiration from Caligari in Shillerkietz.

I’m giving two stars for the good choice of wine and for serving bio food. I hope you guys will improve your service and reconsider your prices. Maybe then you will have a full restaurant with satisfied guests. All the...

We had dinner at this restaurant with a group of 12 and it was a terrible experience. We made a reservation two weeks prior to the date and were placed at a table that did not fit all of us properly. This made the seating very uncomfortable. No solution was offered to this and when asked if we could add a table or move inside they told us it was not possible because they wanted to keep tables empty for walk-ins.

We ordered all the starters to share and pasta’s for the main. It took very long for the starters to arrive and no heads up was given nor somewhat of an apology for the delay.

The wait for the mains was even worse. By the time the pasta's were served we were already there for 2.5 hours. Most of the pasta's were undercooked and not even hot. We addressed this with our waitress and the chef came to our table to ask what was wrong. He tried one of our pasta’s and arrogantly told us it was al dente and that we did not like our pasta al dente. He did not even seem to care about our feedback and was convinced that it was our issue instead of his. Most of us have worked or still work in the restaurant industry so we know how a pasta is supposed to taste like. The pasta’s that we did not send back were still flavorless and the vegan pasta’s were a complete joke.

We decided we did not want new pasta’s anymore cause all we wanted was to leave this place. This made the chef even more frustrated and we could see him gossiping & ranting about us with one of the waitresses. They later continued to do this outside so we could even hear them.

And don't even get me started on the service and the (lack of) professionalism from our waitress. She was extremely slow, rude and incompetent. I think I've never seen a waitress this unprofessional and careless. She was clearly intoxicated and even drank alcohol in front of us.

This was by far the worst experience all of us had in years. I would not recommend anyone to ever visit this restaurant. It is a complete and utter waste of your...

Worst restaurant I have been at in the past 5 years. Seriously. No idea how they have such good reviews ?! The waitress had absolutely no idea what she was talking about, could barely speak English (she spoke no German neither. Of course). After repeatedly asking her about our drinks they finally arrived after one hour after sitting down at our table. Wine was not chilled, as the waitress did lots of things at once, without finishing any of those. She obviously had no experience nor talent working in gastronomy. She was the only service staff, but the restaurant is tiny and consists of around 7 tables only. Should not be a problem to give enough attention to all of them at once.

The mains were at first forgotten by the waitress and finally arrived one hour after ordering them. Hoping that at least the food would be good, we were disappointed once again. One dish of pasta was cold (it did claim to have a sauce made of asparagus, unfortunately the only thing one could taste was peas, no idea where that asparagus was supposed to be ?!) the other two pasta dishes that came in a cheese sauce were inedible, as they had way too much salt and pepper that burned the mouth. I usually love a spicy peppery dish. But this was too much… On the bright side, they did agree to take the pasta off the bill. Never again will we come here and I cannot recommend this to...