Tandem Ragù - Sedile di Porto — Restaurant in Naples

Excellent experience! The waiter, seeing we were tourists, first explained the two types of ragu sauce - one red (with tomatoes) one "white", the Napolitano Genovese with olive oil and onions. Then an introduction to the four main types of pasta that we would encounter in the menu. Finally, our waiter left us with a squeaky toy (literally) so we could get his attention because it was going to get noisy (this was around 19:15 on a Sunday night). Well, the ragu was excellent - we sampled the Zitti pasta once with the "red" ragu and once with the aforementioned "white" sauce; both were excellent, served in our case with a side of grilled cold vegetables, also very typical of Napolitan cuisine. The wine was a HUGE glass of primitivo, one of the Italian mainstays of heavy red wines, not unlike a heavy Syrah. "Moio 57 Cantine Moio Primitivo" normally reserved per bottle, but here proposed by the glass, our waiter seeing that I was interested in wine. This was one of the two suggestions he made, and I was really happy with my choice.

The Tandem soon got really busy and full (most other restaurants are closed on a Sunday night) and the staff had their work cut out for them, but managed to remain friendly and pretty reactive.

We were quite charmed by our experience, and recommend the Tandem to other Anglophones - our waiter seemed quite eager to work on his English ;-) Also I should mention that at least half of the diners were Italian, which seems to also be a good harbinger for a quality experience. Price was really reasonable for two persons, 44 € including two desserts and my enormous glass of wine (more like 3 glasses!) in a very large connaisseur wine glass for 5€.

À great...

I have seen growing what is now a chain of restaurants, and I was not too happy with this restaurant.

Service was nice, even though there was a mistake with our order, and after we had to wait for a while, we didn’t want to return it. So we changed things around, because I wanted my guests to try all the best Tandem and the Neapolitan cousin has to offer, with the promise that one of the dishes was going to be removed from the bill. This didn’t happen at last, which left me a bit disappointed.

Anyway, my guests were really happy with the food: gnocchi al ragù and ziti with genovese sauce. They also got a starter with mozzarella served with ragù sauce, which they told me was great.

I myself had vegetarian ragù, which honestly seemed more a pasta with peas considering the amount of them. Way too many peas! I have been vegetarian for a long time and I can assure you, you can have good ragù just with a bit of onions and well cooked tomato sauce. I remember that it was like this when the first Tandem opened, but over the years I saw an increasing amount of peas and carrots in the tomato sauce. Really not necessary.

I appreciated the new choices on the menu, even though I liked it most when you had only two sauces and the menu consisted in choosing the pasta. I also understand the increase in prices, but it felt more authentic and less adjust to the market before. The quality is always really good, but I hope you won’t miss your identity to satisfy a more...

We got redirected here from the original Tandem because they were packed. Hearing and reading so many good things about the place we decided to try the sister restaurant. Unfortunately the expectations were not to be fulfilled. As with so many hyped restaurants in touristic places I was wondering which standards other people use to give a 5 star rating. It should always be related to price, location and other parameters. In this case the location was OK, ambience - well I don't really know how to describe photo wallpaper with denim jeans - service nothing to write home about, and the food... It was OK, nothing more and nothing less. But I have definitely had better pasta for 12 Euros in better locations. The ragu is like the rest - OK. One more thing which is a general observation I made - why is every single Italian restaurant outside of Italy able to put a pepper mill and salt on your table...