Dunne & Crescenzi — Restaurant in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown

Prefacing this review by saying that I understand the amount of pressure on the hospitality industry at the moment in terms of finding and keeping staff, however there is no excuse for the treatment and attitude we and other customers received here at this restaurant today from both staff and management.

We turned up to see if we could get a table, waited patiently but were not even acknowledged by 3 different members of staff who passed us by. Not a great start but maybe they’re busy. We overheard a very stressed manager/supervisor tell a customer who had approached him, “there’s tables ahead of you, it will take me 10 minutes to come clean your table”, it came off quite rude and was a bit of a red flag. We looked around and the restaurant didn’t seem like it was busy enough to warrant this level of attitude and stress from senior staff.

We were sat inside eventually and felt it was taking a little too long to have our order taken so I tried to approach staff to ask if we could order, the waitress was very dismissive and didn't even look up to me to tell me she would be over in a few minutes. Another while passed and no sign, so I tried to catch the attention of the manager/supervisor to which he irritably said “yes there’s other tables ahead of you, i will be over in a few minutes” again with the same attitude and tone he had with the other customer. In the end we got up and left because the tone had been set for what kind of service we were in for.

Every member of staff we encountered made us feel like an inconvenience, we should have left when we saw how the manager/supervisor spoke to the previous customer about cleaning her table. There was no reason or excuse for how rude the staff were today, staff should be trained to be able to deal with a bustling (but not SUPER busy) restaurant and this did not seem to be...

Once a great favourite of ours, the original restaurant was superb. It had been a while since we visited one of the restaurants, and it was a very poor experience. My husband had a prawn salad which did not live up to expectations. There was a huge bowl of largely iceberg lettuce - not what one would expect to get as a salad dish in an Italian restaurant. The prawns were actually shrimp, not prawns. The salad appeared to have been sitting about for a while - we both thought it must have been left overs as it certainly wasn't fresh, let alone interesting or tasty. The pine nuts were not even toasted!

I ordered a vegetable soup with beans, which seemed to have been made of the water the canned beans had come in as it was watery and brownish/red in colour. The vegetables appeared to be reconstituted, all being exactly the same sized tiny cubes of what I think were potato and carrot with the said beans. I used 2/3 packets of salt and black pepper but it still tasted of nothing.

Both were served with some sourdough which wasn't too bad - at least it helped fill the hungry gap. I had a glass of wine which was OK and reasonably priced. My husband had a coffee which he pronounced to be OK. The service was pretty slow though staff were OK - nothing spectacular. The dining area has been half closed off, and not very attractively, but I accept that is probably coronavirus-related.

The cost of this very unsatisfactory meal was EUR35.60. Compare this with a sandwich I bought in a restaurant in Waterford on Wednesday when I had a delicious sourdough bun filled with roast chicken and salad; with a side salad of freshly made coleslaw and a salad of fresh, crisp green leaves, at EUR9.95.

All in all, a terribly disappointing experience especially from a one time...

Not a good experience. Two of the three meals ordered were delivered incorrectly. We ate them anyway, because changing them seemed like more of a problem that eating something unplanned was. We mentioned it to the waitress when she cleared the plates. It was intimated that it was our fault for ordering from the daily board (when we actually used the menu).

The manager did come a bit later and apologised and said we wouldn't have to pay for the two incorrectly suppied plates. Unfortunately when we got the bill, this promise hadn't been kept.

Then there was the long waits for taking our order for the dessert; the two glasses of limoncello that were brought when we asked for the bill, never mind the 30 minute wait (in a by this time almost empty restaurant) to have the credit card swiped.

Been a long time since I was in such a comprehensively bad restaurant with such poor service. The food that we ate was OK but not worth what we ended up paying for it.

Unfortunately I can't give lower than one star for any of the above. Don't go is my...