Da Paolino — Restaurant in Capri

Ok, let's start with some background: I was born and bred in Naples, so I know a great deal about local food, of all sorts. I've also been living in London for over 5 years, and I am used to pricy restaurants and know what a decent modern service is like.

Let's get started.

The location: enchanting; it's a lemon orchard, beautifully kept and the space is very well furnished.

The food: although the restaurant is famous for its starters (antipasti) buffet, we decided not to go for it. We ordered à la carte.

Starters:

I decided to go for a simple "bomba", which is a fried calzone (folded pizza) stuffed with ham (cooked), fior di latte (unsalted mozzarella), etc. served with a nice tomato sauce which reminded me of the same sauce you put on top of traditional Neapolitan fried pizzas (montanara). Very tasty, but hugely overpriced (9 euros for street food that it's usually worth around 2 euros max, even as well cooked as Paolino's bomba). Then again, we are in Capri, and everything is unjustifiably overpriced, even in low season.

My wife went for a starter of smoked salmon. She liked it; I tasted it too, and it was good. Portion was reasonable. Price, again, a ridiculous 26 euros.

First (pasta) courses: we decided to skip these.

Second courses:

I ordered a grilled sea-bass fillet, which came with a simple salad as a side dish. The fillet was beautifully cooked, but for the kind of service they claim to offer, finding two bones in the fillet had not to happen. Again, the portion was overpriced, but closer to the average of other restaurants in Capri, which all charge a lot for seafood second courses.

My wife's choice was the real deal-breaker here: I suggest the chef to consider withdrawing the "Mari e Monti" dish from the second course listing. An utter disaster (so much so that they didn't make us pay for it). The idea of grilling octopus to such an extent of drying it up is almost culinary heresy. That thing was something between crunchy and chewy, and tasted nothing like octopus. Different story for the squid: on top of being overcooked, I believe the squid was poor quality to begin with, because no matter how long you chewed it, eventually you had to give up and swallow the whole bite. This dish is a mistake, plain and simple.

We finished off with the dessert buffet: very good, I can't complain about this one. The caprese cake was particularly good in terms of flavour delivered and texture.

Overall, a disappointment. There is room for improvement. A lot.

PS: the wine: a white Falanghina, very...

I rarely review a restaurant because I can always go somewhere else but I had to this time. We showed up for a 6pm reservation on our 51st Anniversary. We were meeting two other people there for their birthday. We went there specifically to get a couple of veal dishes that were on their website menu. As we walked in the door the waitress was just telling a table of 13 that they were out of veal. That was my first clue that things were not going to go well. We decided to stay because we had invited our friends to buy them dinner at what we thought was a great restaurant and we could eat something else anyway. We were seated by the only waitress in the place who turned out to be the only good thing we experienced. We decided on lasagna as we figured it is a common Italian dish and should be very good at this supposedly excellent restaurant. When the bread arrived it was burned black on the bottom and the olive oil dip was the worst I have ever tasted, if in fact it was real olive oil. I could have sent it back but I figured we were not going to eat much bread anyway and the waitress was running around doing her best to serve everyone in the place. We didn’t have to wait an inordinate amount of time (we weren’t in a rush anyway) for the entree to arrive. It looked appetizing so we dug in. I don’t want to say things like “it was terrible” etc but it was definitely VERY disappointing and not what anyone who has ever eaten lasagne would call anywhere near authentic Italian. It was mainly noodles with some sauce and a little meat of some kind. There was absolutely NO ricotta cheese (which I feel really makes lasagna taste great) and the sauce was bland. I have had much better Italian food at The Olive Garden (which for some reason gets a bad rap in my estimation). So there it is my review of Da Pollani's. As you can tell by my anniversary number I am no stranger to dining out and I cannot fathom how this restaurant gets good reviews. I’m always impressed when the owner responds to bad reviews as this one apparently does but there is no way he can justify our “experience”. Once again, the waitress was great and got a decent tip but everything else was overpriced and inferior. I have no ax to grind here and my friend who is a cancer survivor and only eats soft desserts said the Tiramiso was good. Sorry Mr or Ms owner I really hate to send a review like this but I think you would like to know how your...

Heard soo many good things about this restaurant and how it’s one, if not the best in capri. But I was very disappointed

Reserved a table at 11 but had to wait an additional 15 minutes to be seated! I got the pink lemonade and the desert selection.

The lemonade was okay but definitely not worth €20! For a cup that’s half filled with ice. I was contemplating whether to get the dessert selection, and at the end I got it thinking that for €29 it must be amazing. It was horrible. The tiramisu tasted like any other tiramisu that you can buy from a supermarket, the lemon meringue was overly sweet and tasted cheap. The chocolate pasty was like any other croissant and was dry and hard. The pistachio fruit tart had no fruit flavour and the pistachio “flavour” was also not there. And the pefetarol was very bad and had a very weird caramel flavour.

My friend also got orange juice and a Caesar salad which tasted below average and definitely not worth €35, and the orange juice also tasted weird.

The atmosphere was also lacking. Despite the amazing setup of the resistant, no music was playing and all you could hear was peoples conversations and cutlery hitting the plates.

Service was also bad as we had to look for waiters for them to do their job and to get things. And by the end having to pay €18 for service charge was just appalling.

The bill came to €120 which in London would pay for an amazing high end resultant which actually good food and service.

Please save your money and do not come here. If I could I would get a full refund for...