Osteria Cipolla Rossa — Restaurant in Florence

FOREIGNERS BEWARE: We unfortunately had a poor experience tonight at this restaurant. It is our first night in Florence, and our hotel manager recommended this restaurant to us. I read the reviews and was excited to have our first meal here. Overall the food was good, the kitchen gets a 👍, but the service was abysmal. I considered that they were busy and maybe short-staffed, despite several open tables, but one server said that tonight was not busy. Essentially, a female waitress was clearly not having a good night and taking it out on all of the tourists/foreigners dining in the restaurant. She would throw menus down, walk away and ignore you without coming back. We never received water or an introduction to the menu or even the restaurant! In fact, she didn't even ask us if we needed a translated menu or help with understanding the menu, she just threw down a menu in French (we didn't speak French) - maybe because we tried greeting her in Italian? We tried to be courteous, respectful, and interested guests to her city and restaurant, and what we got was dismissiveness, condescension, and rudeness. We saw this happen to other foreigners in the restaurant, one table up and left because of being ignored for so long. We thought of leaving too, but had placed our order already and tried to give it a thorough chance. We were never greeted, introduced to their menu, offered wine suggestions or popular item suggestions. They didn't seem at all pleased that we chose to dine with them. Our appetizer was unappealing to us (paté) and we were still charged despite not eating it (okay no problem). But helping us order would have alleviated a problem like this. We had no help with the wine selection, but fortunately we chose well with that (randomly). We had the chicken entree with potatoes, plain and simple, but good. We also had pappardelle with boar meat. This was tasty. They slapped down a dessert menu onto our table without talking to us at all, and when we declined dessert, picked it up in a huff and walked away. Seriously some of the worst service I've had ever, and a terrible introduction to treatment in Florence. We had just come from Naples and would go back for their hospitality in...

The restaurant itself is well decorated with a good music. Check the toilets and their door like ancient ones. But the food itself was a bit disappointing. We took a plate of cheese with three different ones plus a mozzarella with fruits, jam and truffled honey : the mozeralla di buffalla was making of taste but the other cheese were good, with different type of affinage. Then we chose the gnocchi with salmon and the ravioli stuffed with potatoes and a bolognese sauce : well, both plates were wayyy too salty!! No tap water so... When I started with the gnocchi I though the unbalanced taste was due to the fish, but damn the ravioli were even more salty! Also, the ravioli pasta were unevenly cooked with the borders dried and the middle over cooked... Did they use micro wave on them? And then used the sauce to covered it up? Or due to the stuffing, the ravioli can't cook properly? We didn't drink wine but they have a prominent menu for them, but many are not property stored in the restaurant itself. Not so much tourists as clients but instead Italian people, so maybe some plates are better...

Today our experience in this place was bad. We were in this place a month ago during our previous visit to Florence. And everything was fine. We decided to come back and it was a big mistake.

Today we waited for our order for more than 1 hour. After 45min of waiting we asked the waiter about our order. He just forgot it!! What a shame for restaurant. After that they took 5 euros more for “service” or maybe waiter just took it for himself, I don’t know, they didn’t give us the final bill. Because our bill should be 40 euros. So service should be 10% - 4 euros. But change from 50 euros was just 5. I don’t think that I should pay more than 10% in a such situation. We were too tired for arguing, so just left this place.

After our first visit I thought it could be our favourite place in Florence, but...