Albergo del Sole Ristorante Pizzeria — Restaurant in Varenna

I (unfortunately) ate at the restaurant but did not stay at the hotel.

This was actually the worst dining experience of my life.

My wife and I just arrived in Varenna on our honeymoon, and someone recommended we eat here. We got to the restaurant at 8:45pm and waited to be seated for about five minutes. At that point a table for two opened up and we sat down. We ordered within five minutes or so. So far, fine.

Then began the first wait.

We were not given water or bread for 30+ minutes. The only reason we appear to have been given it at all is because we reminded our waiter, who truly seemed to have forgotten all about us.

We continued to wait for our food for another 30+ minutes. At this point we had started to lose our appetites. Once again we tried to remind our waiter and another waiter about us, and we were eventually assured that our food was coming soon.

I wish the food had never come.

We ordered three dishes. The mussels appetizer was particularly awful - the mussels were noticably old and the sauce made it worse. The fish described as "cooked in butter and sage" was fried and tasteless. The shellfish ravioli was maybe least offensive but the filling tasted like the seafood had gone a little bad.

Within minutes I was ready to leave and my wife was nauseous. I will spare readers the rest of the evening's details but it wasn't pretty.

Avoid...

We ate here last night and the guy serving us was so rude and made me extremely uncomfortable. He barely said a word, pointed to the table we were to sit at and threw cutlery down on the table. We sat down and he came to take our order, halfway through us ordering he walked away from the table. We were sat confused for several minutes before he came back and said the tablet he was putting our order through on had stopped working and he had to go and change it. He did not communicate this at all he simply walked away from the table leaving us baffled.

Him and another male staff member then proceeded to stand directly behind me, pointing and making creepy comments to eachother about a girl in the bar next door. I asked to move table (there were 5 free tables) but he straight up just told me no. He stood behind me the whole time I was eating and it was extremely uncomfortable and unpleasant. The food was fine. I ordered white wine but got given red, I felt too uncomfortable to say anything to the waiter. The atmosphere was BAD. The staff members here have absolutely NO customer service skills and I would not return here or recommend it to anyone purely for that reason. Creepy unpleasant men just after money...

We stayed here for three nights in the summer. It’s in a wonderful location right in the centre village square of Verenna. The room was nice and spacious and the air conditioning was the best we had experienced in Italy. We had a small balcony where we could sit and people watch! There was a wedding at the Church just across the street where we had a birds eye view of the guests and bridal procession coming and going. The hosts of this quaint and lovely hotel were very welcoming and friendly and provided a basic but very satisfactory breakfast each morning. We didn’t eat at this hotel in the evening preferring to explore and eat at other restaurants of which there were plenty to choose from, although I must say that our hotel always looked busy in the restaurant where there were tables outside with parasols as well as tables inside if you preferred. I would highly recommend this hotel for a 2 to 3 night break. We parked our car in the multi-story car park just 3-4 minutes walk away, it is very secure and has plenty of spaces so no need to worry about car parking here. If I remember correctly it costs €20 a day to park here which is quite expensive but really there is no...