TAULA — Restaurant in Lecce

Taula had excellent bread and generally good quality ingredients during our two visits to the restaurant but there were several notable issues that brought their stars down to a three.

First, the fried seafood was not very fresh. Second, the plate listed as handmade orecchiette was not orecchiette, perhaps it was minchiareddhri? Not a big problem but it wasn’t what the menu stated. The tomato sauce was fine but unexceptional. The pasta with grouper was again, not orecchiette, and although it wasn’t bad it wasn’t really good either. Just sort of bland.

The service was notably bad. There were three or four waiters and only a single other couple in the restaurant but they seemed to be annoyed that they had to wait on us. Each time I waved to our server, who spoke English, he always sent another young man who didn’t speak a word of English. We would try to communicate with the young man and then he’d go fetch our waiter anyway. Why? He certainly didn’t take the time, even once, to swing by the table to check on us. It almost felt like purposefully...

There was a large group of us that came to Italy and we had to change our plans several times throughout the day and when we finally showed up to this restaurant, they accommodated everyone (22) graciously and the food was beyond amazing. We had several chefs and restaurant owners in our group and we were all Absolutely blown away. Two of us came back to this area after traveling around southern Italy and we met With the same generous, hospitality and warm welcome. The food is amazing and as I type the review, the restaurant is absolutely packed inside and outside. Highly recommend and if you come, definitely ask for LELE and meet the owner, the chefs wife. Lovely team here...

We had a delicious lunch at Taula. We’d had a very early start from London, a very easy drive from Brindisi but we were very hungry and needed a decent cold beer. Our food was very good, we shared a small tagliere with warm bread, the meat selection was tasty but I would’ve liked more cheese. I had a large salad, which was excellent. My husband had a porrchetta and mozzarella sandwich - he loved it. We ended up having two perfect Session IPAs and an espresso, to help us make it to Aperitivo time. Note: after several other Tagliere boards. Taula definitely offers the best selection of meat, cheese and warm bread. We also had an excellent second lunch with a fab bottle...