Pizzium - Via Vigevano — Restaurant in Milan

As a waiter of 4 years, and a customer for many more, I can comfortably state that this is the worst dining experience I have ever had. I rarely write reviews but, following my experience here, I feel compelled to for the sake of future diners.

I arrived with my girlfriend at 8pm on a Saturday in August. Given just 1 of the restaurant’s (circa 30?) indoor tables were occupied, we sat ourselves at a table of 4 to allow ourselves the opportunity to both look out the window together and watch the world go by. We were immediately barked at to move to a table of two, despite the restaurant being almost empty with no reservations. Not the most welcoming, intelligent or savvy of welcomes from a front of house team to their customers… but hey, I understand some front of house staff decide to act like this, so we obliged and continued on with our night.

We tried to order a bottle of white wine. They told us they had none of their 3 white wines available. We ordered their bottle of rosé and… received the same response. We ordered two aperol spritz and - third time lucky! - they had that in stock.

However, they were the worst aperol spritz we had ever tried - by a country mile. They tasted gone-off (somehow?). I later asked the staff whether they were served from a tap; my suspicions were confirmed. Given they had 7 waiting staff standing around chatting all evening, with just a handful of tables to serve, perhaps one of the waiters could have removed themselves from conversation to whip up a couple of proper Aperol spritz’s? This is an Italian restaurant we’re talking about after all…

Anyway, we at least had the food to look forward to, right? Wrong. First, the food arrived - literally - within 2 minutes of taking the order. Always a very worrying sign. My girlfriend (who never complains about anything) had one mouthful of her parmigiana and whispered to me “I think it’s cold”. I tried a bite and - yes - somehow, it was ice cold. If you’re going to reheat food, at least remember to…reheat it…?

Meanwhile, my pizza was not a pizza. It was a disgrace. The cold tomato sauce (with scarce freckles of cheese) merged with the uncooked pizza dough to create the consistency of tomato soup left out in the sun all afternoon. It’s as though they just poured tinned tomatoes on a pizza base and had it simply look at the pizza oven, before deciding to serve it to us in a world record time of 2 minutes - as though time not taste was their measure of a successful dinner service.

We called the waiter over and explained the facts. We expressed that we simply could not pay for this food and encouraged them to try it themselves. They offered to heat up our meals but by this point we knew we just had to get out of there. From start to finish, everything was a complete disaster. To their credit, they at least took the food off the bill (which is why this is a 2 star review not a 1 star review). So, we paid for our rancid tap-poured aperols (after a one-and-done sip each) and went on our way.

Oh, and as suspected, not a single other customer entered the restaurant throughout this whole experience… meaning we would have of course been fine to sit on a table of 4 as initially desired. A very minor point, but one that aptly reflects the attitude of the management team. An attitude perhaps not best aligned with customer facing roles.

At the next bar, we laughed at how terrible this entire dining experiences was - comfortably the worst either of us have had in 30 years of consuming meals on this planet. Then, for the first time in my life, I felt obliged to write this review so that no other customers have to endure such an impressively bad restaurant experience.

I’m sure not all the staff are to blame. Our waitress was kind, attentive and nice enough throughout. But the management need to take a long hard look at each of these points and self-effacingly decide if what they’re offering is truly up to standard at this current stage of their...

😔 rude guy coordinating reservations. Awful experience...

We found this place on Internet. We did a reservation for 21.30hs. We arrived at 21.20hs to announce ourselves and it was a complete mess. A lot of people lined up without being attended and a lot of confusion. When I told the guy who was coordinating the reservations that I arrived he freaked out and asked me to wait outside with the rest of the people. I did that. Then he went outside and asked who had reservations and I managed to tell him (again) that I was one with reservation between all the crowd. He assigned us a place outside (my reservation was for an outside table) which was one of the worst locations near a construction (check attached photo). The table was completely dirty with water spilled on it, also in chairs. I went again to tell this guy about this so they could clean the table and he asked me to wait 5 mins so rude like if I was so anxious that I should have to sit down and wait on a table with líquids spilled... So we did that. We ordered our pizzas and then after 45 mins we asked them why it was taking so long and they said they forgot our order. Pizzas arrived after 2 mins. They were good, the food was great, but I would not go back to this place. Rude and mean staff. Place super crowded because is cheap as hell. One of my worst dinners I will never forget... We did not get a good experience even when we behaved correctly all the time.

Place is super loud.

Not recommended if you have children.

I...

#racism I was recommended the place, so tried calling to book a table but no one replied. Along with two female friends we arrived there around 20mins after its opening to find out that despite almost no guests inside (app. 30 seats available) we can only sit outside if we haven’t made the reservation. We were starving and it took us a long time to get there so we agreed. After a few minutes the waiter told us we can sit inside but only for one hour. Again, we agreed. We thought it was a bit weird as there were no signs of reservation on any of the tables. The waiters were nice, food was good and we started leaving after around one hour as we were asked. The restaurant got pretty full by then, but still had many empty seats. While we were paying two groups of Italians entered and asked for available seats. The waiter said ‘no problem’ and let them in.

60€ bill is a bit much for getting such a...