Osteria Caroseno — Restaurant in Castellana Grotte

We came to have Sunday lunch and did not stay at the hotel. First and most important, the food is excellent. The Chef has a deep knowledge of how to create balanced and delicious food. Everything we ate was of high quality, the ingredients were top of the line. We have 2 recommendations for the service experience which needs improvement. First, print menus for each table and provide them to customers as QR codes are a clunky experience and dont always result in the menu rendering well on different mobile phones. We asked for a printed menu and there was a couple of menus in the entire restaurant, which is odd. Second, assign staff to a set of tables as the all servers were serving all tables and there were often times when a request was forgotten by one person and we had to ask another server multiple times for what we needed. Sunday was quite busy and there was not enough organization on the floor of the restaurant to manage the load. Having said that the servers work very hard and are dedicated to their customers, so to the Chef, please fix these two service items because it is the difference between being Good and being Great...and your...

Not a great experience. Style over substance in more ways than one. Trying to be what they are not.. Waited 25minutes for someone to actually take the order while restaurant wasn't even busy, (no menu on the table, just go on the website thingy that makes it feel like cheap take away place - no full menu on it either - as we were told by the waiter) Waited another 20minutes for wine to arrive, and another 10 for plate of cold meats and cheese. Food was tasty but the seafood dish is just bland, cold, served on its own.. Lil olive oil and lemon juice would do the trick. My husband ordered veal which came with the string that had been cooked in (this should've been removed prior to serving!!) They tried to charge us for the bread that never actually arrived. We had to ask twice for a bill and only when we started walking out, someone took a notice of us. Very loud and noisy too so not a nice relaxing atmosphere... Poor show. Staff are nice and polite just not very well trained and efficient. Shame that. Really looked forward to a nice meal. Left disappointed and if it wasn't for my husband I would've walked out after 25min of being...

The restaurant has a nice atmosphere, especially in the central area, which feels charming. Unfortunately, that’s where the good impressions end. We were a group of four and ordered four pasta dishes and four meat dishes. The only good one was the tortellini; the gnocchi were bland, watery, and had no flavor at all.

The meat dishes were not good either: the lamb was very greasy, the chicken was too salty, and the veal was tough and hard to chew.

We wanted to give feedback to the waiter, but the service was poor, and no one came to our table for over 30 minutes. Finally, we went to the bar to pay and mentioned that we didn’t like the meat. The waiter did give us a scoop of melon sorbet each, but it tasted like water.

Overall, it seems the restaurant wants to do well but doesn’t have the right skills to pull it off. It might be better to focus on a few good dishes instead of trying to do too much without the quality. We made a special trip to eat here, and we all left very...