La Tartarughina — Restaurant in Tokyo

I came here late at night for dinner with a friend. For reference, we ordered 2 drinks, 1 appetizer, 2 pastas, and 2 meat dishes which ended up to be about 20,000 yen total. The price is a bit steep for the amount of food that you get as we both were not exactly full after the meal.

The homemade pastas themselves were delicious, but the uni sauce tasted a bit too fishy for our liking. The meat dishes were both tasty and cooked well but again, portions were a bit small.

The staff were friendly, but what bugged me the most during the whole meal was that we could clearly hear the staff chit-chatting next door at our table. We were seated on the second floor in a room that was connected to another room which had the service counter (no door separation). Towards the end of our meal when all the tables around us had left, the staff started taking out cleaned tableware and placing them on an empty table behind us. At the same time, in the next room with the service counter, we could hear loud clanking of silverware and the chattering of staff as they conglomerated to clean. I understand that they wanted to start cleaning early but it was rude to do that so loudly when customers were still seated in the dining area adjacent. For a restaurant that closes at 12AM, it felt as if we had extended our stay with all their cleaning and chatting. it was also very unprofessional of them to have a loud conversation that was so...

This was a very interesting experience, but first is that the food was very tasty, albeit slightly pricey. It fit a 12 person group in the basement floor with a reservation, and had a pretty cozy atmosphere with nice background music. The servers did their best to speak and understand our english, but it was difficult at times. We ordered with the online English menu, but there are a couple things to consider that confused our group: First, the pasta images on the online menu is extremely tiny compared to the actual serving that you get, which lead us to order too much. Second, when we ordered two servings of the same pasta, they put both of those servings on one plate, but we didn’t know that. Because of this, we were wondering why the pasta serving was so huge and why the other serving of pasta wasn’t coming. We ordered too much food, but they had takeout boxes for the pizza. The problems I had with my group was probably a combination of not being able to speak Japanese and not being familiar with Italian cuisine, but I think these are good things to...

I’ve been traveling to Tokyo for over 20 years and this was, by far, one of the worst dining experiences I’ve ever had.

The food was truly awful—completely below any acceptable standard. Despite being an Italian restaurant, the food was neither Italian nor Japanese in quality or flavor. For a price of 8,500 yen per person, the quality was shockingly poor. Our group of 8 was crammed into a tiny basement, which made the experience even worse. The pasta was not well cooked, and the sauce tasted as if it came straight from a supermarket shelf. The pork shoulder was stinky af and too salty.

Overall, the meal was terrible, and I would never return. We also felt slightly disrespected as tourists, which added to the negativity of the experience. The one redeeming factor was a helpful waitress who did her best despite the circumstances. This was a thoroughly disappointing experience, and I wouldn’t recommend this...