Cortile Botà – Restaurant & Cocktail Bar — Restaurant in Syracuse

A shocking experience from start to finish. I’ll keep to the facts:

We asked for a wine list but were only offered white or red. We opted for 3 x white, 2 x red and a beer. The white poured was undrinkable - think vinegar. The red offered was rose. We specified red and on the second time poured it was still rose. We yet again asked for a wine list but still not given one. The red finally arrived and yet again was undrinkable. We were finally given a wine list and chose what we wanted. Both the white and the red wine were beautiful. My husband’s beer (bottled Messina) tasted weird. On a closer look it was out of date by 3 months. The food order taking was shambolic. The waiter had to check four times what we had ordered. 10 minutes later they came back and re-checked. The order was wrong. We worked yet again with the staff to confirm what we wanted - 1 x seabass with pistachio crumb, 2 x baked seabass, 1 x tuna, 2 x scampi pasta, 2 x potatoes and 1 x caponata. The food arrived and the order was wrong. 3 x Seabass with pistachio crumb which was a cheap crumbed fried fish fillet on a bed of spinach and olives. 1 x tuna, 1 x scampi pasta, 1 x potatoes and 1 x caponata. This meant one of our party was missing a meal, two had the wrong order and we were missing a side of potatoes. 15 minutes later they said that the second scampi pasta was ready. By then we were over the experience and cancelled it. The second potatoes never arrived. We asked for the bill. They tried to offer us gifts of wine or desert but we were ready to leave so politely declined. When presented with the first bill there were a number of additional items included equating to €60 - most comically 5 fish (we only had 3, and 2 of those were wrong!). It took 3 attempts to get the bill correct. No compensation given with regards to a reduction in the bill and an insistence on us paying the cover charge. I have never been to such a badly run, disorganised restaurant in any of the countries that I have travelled in, I have travelled widely. Unfortunately there are a couple of lovely waitresses that try and make life easier and more efficient but due to the egos of male owners the staff are not empowered to do so.

I understand that there can be a language barrier when travelling to different countries and our Italian is limited to say the least. However, there are solutions around this and numbers on the menu seem to work elsewhere in Ortigio. Maybe this is something...

Really disappointing experience. Food was extremely plain and ridiculously overpriced. The pricing was very unclear and I feel that I was certainly ripped off. For a simple small fish that was grilled without any herbs or even basic salt I ended up paying 40 eur. Fish was not even big enough to feed one person, plus it tasted like nothing and was full of tiny bones - literally inedible. What is even worse, when ordering the fish they asked me if I would like a potatoes or veggies for a side dish, but they failed to mention that a side cost extra 10 eur (this is also not explained on a menu). So tiny tasteless unclean fish with dry veggie side (also tastless by the way) ended up costing 50 eur. Dishes of 3 of my friends were also extremely unimpressive. Rarely I get so disappointed with a restaurant and I am generally rather easy with these things, but this has really stood off from other experiences. Avoid this place, you can get a fantastic food for those same 50 eur at almost any other...

New years disaster - It is new years and we had ordered a table here some days before and we where sat outside and it was cold even though we arrived and there where still tables open on the inside we had to be outside. We ordered starters and main courses and a bottle of red wine thad did not arrive until we had finished our starters and we already had told to the waiters twice that we are missing our wine. Then our “medium” tagliata (beef) came that everyone on the table had ordered and it was just bad, overcooked and tough. We the left more then half of the food on our plate and waited for more then 30 minutes for some one to come and check on us and in the end we decided we wanted to leave and not eat anything else there so we went to pay our 190 Euro bill when they finally asked if everything was okey and we explained what was wrong and they took 20 euros off. But we left the restaurant hungry on New Year’s Eve at 22:30 and we were not able to eat...