Apollonion - Osteria da Carlo — Restaurant in Syracuse

Quantity over quality! You get SO much delicious food here, and so much that you see in other restaurants is featured here. Consider the meal “all of Sicilian seafood in one budget meal.”

Most diners couldn’t finish what was presented near the end of the meal. Plate after plate came out, from marinated anchovies, red shrimp, fritto misto, pasta. It’s such a good survey of the seafood offered here, as I’m sure you’ve read many times by bloggers and magazines who’ve recommended this spot. It’s also solo dining friendly.

However, I found some of the quality to be less than other places I’ve eaten around Oritgia at the same 40€ price point. The anchovies were thin and flat, for example, and 1/3 of clams in pasta didn’t open up. The shrimp were creamy and well balanced, if not smaller than what I’ve seen elsewhere. Service was a bit cold as little was explained; they seemed focused on moving the meal along and it wasn’t as hospitable as other restaurants here. Perhaps it was a language barrier.

Don’t let this keep you away from a great meal and deal - I just found a restaurant like La Lisca of much better quality of fish and taste from cooking. If anything, I’d say they can be half the meal and twice the quality and it’d still be a very...

Shocking experience here.. just 1 star to be given to them just so I can post this review.

We visited Siracusa on a day trip from Catania and found this place only thanks to Rough Guide (they will also be informed to delist these chancers). The service here was horrible, as they knew we were foreigners, somehow we were kept waiting for service after being seated, we could see the waiters treating some customers very badly. We ordered our food, usual pasta stuff, it came after maybe 15 minutes, we had to ask for a beer a few times and were basically ignored by the staff.

We get our food and no bread was given or parmesan cheese either.

This food wasn't great and then to top it off we get the bill and we had been charged €3 each as a cover charge..

Last word: Avoid...

Food okay. They have a fixed menu on 2 seating at about 20:00 & 22:00. We had a reservation at 22:15. Have been waiting and seated at 22:40. There was a big time gap between every course. 🕒 Most of the food was raw, so it didn't make much sense. 🤔 It was close to midnight when we were waiting for the Pasta dish 🍝 Of course the pasta has to be prepared just before serving! For Apollonion it took 38min to prepare pasta around midnight - at a half full restau. 🤦 We had mentioned at the owner that it is late & it takes long for the next course to arrive. He got angry 😤 with that mention, and offered a childish explanation, trying to defend that he is right. It was a cold experience in general, but the last part made it a Very...