Ristorante Acquadolce Lago di Como — Restaurant in Carate Urio

This well known lake front restaurant boasts a beautiful garden view, reasonable attentive service and good quality food.

We order a la carte rather than their tasting menus. The lovely server mentioned a starter of porcini mushrooms and spaghetti which she raved about and recommended. My wife ordered it as the starter which we shared, it was delicious. I ordered a seafood starter and seafood spaghetti with clams, etc, both quite good. For mains I had a perch, my wife had the duck.

A critique would be that the mains perch and duck were both served luke warm. Tasted great but must have been a little kitchen delay in getting them to the table. We'd encourage them to work on that important timing a bit. Another is that the silverware was thin and round. While clearly high quality, it makes it very difficult to hold and turn. The servers all have heard this complaint before, quile not a reason to not dine here, they should be replaced.

Desert was a small gelato and fruit dish, good.

One issue that came up...remember that porcini starter our server recommended? When the check came there was a 100 euro charge. I pointed it out to the server who mentioned it was the starter pasta. My eyes blinked but I paid it since she seemed aware of it. Nicely, the restaurant did call me the next day and apologized profusely as this was clearly an error, the special porcini mushrooms w/pasta starter should have been 30 Euro. They quickly corrected the error and refunded the full amount. Very nice and thank you for that!

We will be back to Urio next summer and will be sure to give Acquadulce another try and hope you do to! It's a...

I would like to start off by saying the food was good (some of the meals really didn’t hit with me) and after dealing with some problems the wait staff was kind. However a few days prior they called the person in my party that booked the reservation and told us to cancel and rebook on their website, as we had booked through a third party. But we couldn’t read the website as it was in all Italian and so we kept it through the third party site. When we got there the woman at the front told us we didn’t have a reservation. It seems they canceled it for us. This then started probably a 10-15 minute quarrel between us and the wait staff. One older man (spoke mostly only Italian), was very sweet once the problem was explained to him and he decided to sit us. His younger colleagues immediately disagreed with a quick no. The man kindly took matters into his own hands, probably trying to prevent a bad review. After that it was ok. Most of the food came out lukewarm. And we were one of the first parties there, but one of the last parties out. This wasn’t due to us talking, they simply took absolutely forever between every course. They forgot to serve us our wine on multiple occasions and when we asked for the check it was sitting at the front unattended. We waited 15 minutes for the check until one of us got up to ask for it (it was 10:30pm and we were ready to leave) It was late and we wanted to sleep. The food wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t worth the hassle or the price. It really didn’t taste like it should be 170 US dollars per person. And maybe the food just wasn’t my taste, but the service alone wasn’t...

Unfortunately sounds like Deja Vu. Service: for me a catastrophe. The man who seems to be in charge of the service is rude and absolutely not competent. Hard to know where to start. It started as we arrived and they did not find our reservation. We had to start a discussion about having a table, although the restaurant was almost empty. Then we were given the menu and after 2 minutes this man came and asked for our choice. It was obvious we were still reading the menu. We asked for a few minutes more and he came back after 30 seconds. Just not acceptable for this kind of restaurant. We ordered a glass of wine for every dishes and trusted the restaurant recommendation. When we got the wine, my wife asked for the wine and the only information we had, was that it came from France. The person had no idea where from. Just ridiculous for such a restaurant. I have to say that the other waitress/waiter were friendly. But this "Chef" waiter is rude and not competent. When I read all the reviews, it is obvious the complaints are concerning this person and I ´do not understand the management taking care of this person.

Food: My wife and son were lucky and loved the food. My starter was very good. The fish was good, but full of fish bones. My dessert (cheesecake) was very small and boring.

All in all, the dinner was ok, but far away from our expectations...