Ristorante Florida Venezia — Restaurant in Venice

Let me start off with this: When a restaurant serves bland, tasteless cream puffs drenched in vaguely chocolate-like syrup, you know it's terrible. Even the whip cream that came with that dessert tasted like nothing. I love desserts and when this concoction landed on my table, I was excited to dig in. At first bite, I thought maybe my taste buds were still adjusting to the less-than-stellar lunch I was just served. But nope. Subsequent bites prove that they somehow managed to come up with cream puffs and whipped cream that had no hint of dairy in it. It was just kind of pasty and gummy and flavorless. Some cream puffs would have deliciously baked shells that would taste eggy (obviously, I'm not a professional food critic) and a little sweet. These shells taste like eating wet paper. And the chocolate, at least that should cover up the taste of nothingness, right? WRONG! I can't even tell you if it was dark chocolate or milk chocolate. I could barely taste a hint of coco in there. I would hesitate to even classify it as chocolate. Frankly, I can go out and buy store made frozen cream puffs, drench them in Hersey's chocolate syrup, and top them off with store-bought whipped cream and it would have tasted better than this...thing.

So as you can imagine, the meal was one of the worst we had in Italy. Bad tasting food aside, the server was horrible! At the end of the meal, I whipped out my credit card to pay since I had a Visa credit card while my husband had Discover, which is not accepted anywhere. So the server says something like "okay, she pays for lunch, but you (my husband) pays for tips, okay?" At first, we thought it was some kind of joke, like "haha, your little wife is paying for the meal so the manly man has to pay something too, right?" and we forced chuckled a bit. But the server, instead of taking my credit card away to work whatever magic he needs to get money from it, kept standing by our table and telling us to tip. He had then pointed out on the receipt that tip was not included and we need to leave a tip and just kept going on and on about tipping.

Well, even if tipping was the norm in Europe (which it isn't), we wouldn't have left anything after he basically harassed us about tipping. To make it worse, there's already a 12% service charge in the bill, which we don't mind paying at all, but not to add tips on top of that. And to harass your customer for tips is the lowest of the low. I don't even get that in America, where tipping is the norm!

Oh, the view was alright if you want to eat in front of hundreds of tourists and put up with the smell from the canal while you're eating. How's that for romance? We should have gone with our first instinct to eat in one of the restaurants in the...

Should you eat at this place? That's what I asked myself when coming to Venice for the first time, and I will say that having been here, it's not worth it.

Short story is, the waiters are impatient and then disappear once they've made you order absurdly priced food (€27 grilled salmon 1 small fillet when in our little shop next to our hotel there were bigger salmon fillets in pairs that were €7) and the view is not worth your time. Try your luck at the other restaurants along the river or a McDonald's.

The view is nice if you can deal with craning your neck around the unnecessary lamps they put on the outside of the gazebo instead of just leaving the sweet view alone. The gazebo itself is cute with fairy lights and what looks like nice tables until u sit down and there's a railing in the middle of the table. If you're going here for a view and a cosy table for a drink, I'd take your chances elsewhere as the view and the experience weren't worth it here. The service was bad. We were pestered into looking at the menue, and when we gave in and looked, the server stood right next to us and gave us no time or space to decide. My partner caved, and we sat down closest to the river. We'd had our menues genuinely a minute before we were asked what we wanted to order. After we sent the waiter away for another 2 minutes to discuss what we wanted to eat and ordered, there was a 30-minute wait before we had our food (drinks were faster). I had the grilled salmon (€27) that was a small salmon fillet, half a bag of whatever green things they could find, and maybe 4 slices of tomatoes. My partner had the margarita pizza (€23). The salmon tasted fresh, and the pizza in my partners words was "good, just mid really, but I wish my cheese would stay on it." During eating, there was no one around, we didn't get checked on at all until I spent ages craning my neck up to try and catch a servers attention for the bill. Our bill was €83 for our 2 dishes, 2 €10 drinks, and an absurd €11 service fee. Id note the waiter wasn't happy when he brought our change back, and I didn't tell him to keep it because after an €11 service fee, i wasn't feeling like they needed a tip. He did bring us free cookie things that tasted like cardboard and was definitely a ploy to get a nice thing said about them. Overall, it's underwhelming, to say the least. It's a waste of money for what you get and a waste of time for what you see. I would highly recommend you go to any McDonald's instead and order the loaded fries and a nice burger any day over this place. The best part of our meal here was the orange slice I stole out of my...

BEWARE THE SERVICE FEE. I think it was 15%. Really delicious though, I had searched a while for Alfredo and eventually came back to this place!

I was able to be seated immediately and enjoyed the view, food came out fast and was an okay portion, it was a bit expensive! Service is definitely pushy and not warm and fuzzy, once you sit down they really don’t care.

Definitely bring your own water if that’s all you want to drink, since it’s 5€ for the small bottle. Coming to Venice I've realized seafood is the way to go! I personally wouldn't get the pizza, especially coming from NJ :) I'm sure a different region in Italy has great pizza , but stick with seafood if you can!

I ordered the grilled shrimp, it was perfectly cook!! It also came with a side of homemade tartar sauce, that was delicious! ( a little sweet )

I also ordered the mushroom truffle risotto ( to share with my partner) was absolutely divine!! I suggest totally giving it a try especially if you don't eat seafood the truffle wasn't overwhelming at all.

My partner ordered the salmon, it was cooked perfectly that it came off in sections. Also came with a side of...