Ristorante Santa Felicita Pontevecchio — Restaurant in Florence

TL;DR: Inconsistent quality, service, and presentation.

I usually don't do bad reviews. My friend had a much better experience here by herself a few nights earlier, but this isn't her review, its a review of the experience we had together.

Service was slow to start, and picked up a bit, but then we were ignored. We started with the Crostini, which was excellent! I had the Ribollita, which was good. The waitress neglected to bring out the bread, so I had nothing to soak up the remains. Then came the spaghetti carbonara, which was ok. my friend thought that it tasted like Kraft cheese sauce, I considered it halfway decent, and not as bad as all that :)

I finished my drink and was waiting for the waitress to come by so I could get another. It didn't happen. She was socializing with the rest of the staff at the front table so we caught the busboy. He was helpful and very friendly, but none too happy to be doing her job and kindly let her know. My friend wanted to leave, but I had ordered the Pomodoro and Basilica salad, so I had her bring it out.

The tomatoes were about as good as the grocery store tomatoes I get in the mountains of Colorado in the dead of winter (It was the middle of June in Florence). On the off chance that they tasted better than they looked, I tried I half of a wedge slice. If they had been left on the vine for another week, they might have approached being ripe. Nearly tasteless, with a consistency to match.

Asked for the check and proceeded to be berated by the waitress for thinking that there was anything wrong with the salad. Yes, we were tourists. Yes we asked for our dishes in a slightly odd way (the carbonara for my friend while I had my zuppa (without any bread ;), maybe she was upset on being called out on it. But don't serve a beautifully simple and delicious dish like tomatoes and basil with tomatoes that would be better served in a stew where you could maybe cover up the fact that they weren't ripe. Whatever...

2 stars is more than generous. Your mileage may vary depending on the night. On a closing note, I REALLY wanted to take a picture of the salad, but we spent the day biking in the hills and my phone...

DON'T EAT HERE. Save yourself time and money and go somewhere else to eat. First, we waited a long time to get our order taken. Then they bring us bread and oil but no plates. So guess what I got oil on the table cloth. We asked for extra napkins and the lady seemed to have been offended and said usually you only get one. But we politely asked for more anyway. She comes back, slaps the napkins on the table and says "well you're getting charged a 2 euro service fee each anyway so that will pay for your napkins", and then leaves. We get our food, 3 of us had pizza and one had a salad. Mind you the pizza came out 5 minutes after we ordered, which means it was premade and reheated. It tasted like cardboard and the cheese was gummy. I got a pepperoni and my friend got a mushroom personal pie. They were identical, all they had done was throw the toppings on top and reheated the pizza. I've had pizza from a box that tasted better. My friend who ordered the salad specifically asked for no corn in her salad, and of course they just left the corn right in there. Then to finish it off they added the "convenience" fee of 2 euros per person as mentioned earlier. There is no warning anywhere that we would be charged that, and we asked the waiter to explain the charge and he said it's customary in Italy when you choose to sit and eat. We've been to an Italian pizza place by our Airbnb twice and haven't been charged anything. He said Google it you'll see it's true. I said sounds more like a tourist fee. But since we can't argue in Italian we paid it and left. Waste of...

This place is exactly what it seems. A tourist restaurant right off the Ponte Vecchio that doesn't put any quality into it's food or vibes because they don't care about retaining repeat visitors, or even securing recommendations. They rely on tourists who are hungry after sightseeing and they are conveniently located. We stumbled on this place because we forgot to make a reservation where we wanted to go and were so hungry we would've eaten anywhere.

The place was empty when we arrived at around 8:15. One other family was sitting at another table. The only other person sitting at a table was a staff member, or maybe the owner, watching videos on his phone at a very loud volume. It was a truly awful vibe.

I had the carbonara, and it was dreadful. Did not taste like any carbonara I've had before, and not in a good way. The wine was fine, nothing really of note positively or negatively, although the didn't seem to have a house wine (I might be wrong on that).

After eating our main course, we left as quickly as possible, so I can't comment on the dessert.

Would strongly recommend not going...