Taverna La Cialoma — Restaurant in Pachino

I must say that I am highly disappointed after all these years. La Cialoma belonged to one of the restaurants I have always liked to go,next to my favourite place Cortile Arabo. However, this year I felt like being in a tourist trap. The restaurant is perfectly located on the main square with an arrangement of tables that has prevented me almost to breath (I am 190cm/88kg). If you look at my photo 📸 you will see what I mean. Once seated you are stuck. Seating is not the most important in a restaurant but belongs to the whole. Unfortunately the food was not convincing either. The datterino tomato salad for 7€ was cheek... A handful datterino tomatoes a bit evoo and that's it. OK, good km0 tomatoes, good evoo but not that way and not for this price. The staff was friendly but like the food without love and soul. As initially said, it felt like being in a cheap tourist trap. A lot of people, rushing for making the table ready for the next ones. I do understand that after Covid one wants to catch up. This has been done but by dramatically decreasing the quality. In my eyes a bad management decision. You have lost a regular customer and I am sure more customers think in a similar way. I wish you a plenty of success with your new concept. Conclusion: no recommendation for the people who...

Having read a review on Conde Nast Traveller of this restaurant, we were really looking forward to a warm welcome and a delicious meal of fresh fish. It’s been years since we were last in a restaurant with such unfriendly indifferent staff. Some of our menu choices were indeed tasty, but the rude behaviour of our waitress and her colleague sadly dominated our experience. When asking politely for a wine recommendation, and explaining that we rather liked Grillo, she paged past all the out of stock wines (first few pages of the wine list) until she came to a Grillo and suggested this saying “this one”. I spotted that there was another Grillo on the same page, and she looked irritated and said “same”. She was so obviously allergic to tourists, and so clearly full of contempt, that this really affected our experience. Sadly when we asked another waiter for help, he was similarly unfriendly. The restaurant next door was more full with patrons on arrival, so please head there! I really don’t want other innocent diners to end up being treated like we were. Vote with your feet, and maybe this restaurant will read some reviews and start to address the poor...

Oh dear. Where to start?

I ate here many years ago when it had just opened and was a normal Sicilian restaurant, and it was pretty good.

Unfortunately it appears to have fallen victim to the fast-buck, high-customer-turnover business model of most other establishments in Marzamemi. If you've zero interest or indeed expectations of customer retention, the first thing to go is service quality, followed swiftly by the quality of everything else.

In my particular case, having ordered what I expected to be a fine meal, I was served both the primi and secondo at the same time. I was like, what? You expect me to leave the fish there while I rush-eat the pasta? And the very blunt response was; "We're busy!" In other words, eat the food and get lost, there's more dumb tourists waiting for that table.

This left such a bad taste, I don't remember what the food was actually like. Bill was €100, and I didn't leave a tip.

I can only hope that Madonna didn't get that kind of service. I think other reviewers having paid top dollar, are inclined to overlook the Basil Fawlty-like service, almost like poor service is OK is the bill is...