Il Mercato — Restaurant in Strassen

I was at this restaurant with a friend. I was a little bit reluctant to try it, but she convinced me that the food is tasty, so i decided to give it a try.

The restaurant 🛋: the interior of this place is interesting. As most of the people frequenting the place already know, the restaurant is placed inside the italiam shop, so you can see shelves with different italian products🍝🍾 while you eat. You can also have a sneak peak into what the chef does, due to the glass wall that separates part of the kitchen (pizza ovens) 🍕from the rest of the place. I find it very interesting and innovative👏🤩👍 to combine a restaurant 🍽 with a shop 🫒🍄and kitchen🔪 in the same layout.

The atmosphere✨️: the place has traffic, many people that know the place regularily coming to have dinner or a drink there. 🍷🍮🍝🍕 There's not too much noise and I didn't feel like I was too close to my neighbors. So we had privacy, we could hear eachother and eat comfortably.👏👍Athough there's the shop in the same place, I didn't even noticed if there were customers doing shopping there.🤓

The service🛎: the waiters were fast in taking our order 📃 and deliver it in a very short time🕜. Our drinks 🍹🍺 were quickly brought to our table so that we could enjoy them before the meal. The service was professional, polite and warm in the same time.🤩😍🙏👏

The food 🍽: we ordered 2 types of pasta, one pizza🍕 and 2 desserts🍮: panna Cotta and tiramisu. I personally had carbonarra, while my friend had the other plate of pasta 🍝. I have tasted everything.

Carbonarra dish 🍝: very well balanced, tasty, good textures, and very big portion.

The other plate of pasta🍝: it is a different option, with tomato sauce which makes you think that the pasta might be sour. Actually this portion of pasta was very well balanced, with nice flavours, extremely tasty and very well cooked. The textures, the ingredients and the flavours mixed in a very delicious way.🤤😍👏

Pizza with ham and mushrooms🍕: It is a normal pizza. I could not say that something from it stood out.👍

Panna cotta 🍮: it is a dish that I like. It can come with different types of accompanying ingredients. The mango syrup on top of it was a little bit too much, but combined with the sour fruits on top of it, balanced the taste of the cake very well.😍🤤👍🍰

Tiramisu 🍰: I think one of the few tiramisu that I have tried in the last years that really tastes like tiramisu.😍🙏👍🤤 It has the textyure and the taste it should have. I enjoyed enomously the taste of coffee, and cocoa spread on top of it, that combined perfectly with the rest of the cake.

To wrap up✒️, te experience is above expectations⭐️😍. What I think that matters the most is the taste of the food that surpasses everything else. The interior🛋, the atmosphere ✨️and the serving🛎 that were impeccable, just add up to this culinary...

Check out!!! Last July I organized an aperitivo at Il Mercato after having agreed with the manager a fixed tariff per person. We also agreed that every extra drink should have been approved by me, during the aperitivo. Unfortunately, after some few extra drinks which were correctly approved by me, nobody asked me about further additional requests and the waiter even put on the table some liqueurs/glasses which nobody had asked. The result was a bill almost twice the initial agreed amount! In principle, this would have not been a major problem, but, considering the significant difference, I decided to double check the bill details, also asking clarification to the people who were invited to the aperitivo. As a matter of fact, I was billed both the "not-agreed" but consumed drinks AND additional non-existing drinks (based on my calculation around 30% additional drinks were fake!). Of course I politely complained with the manager, but he accepted to refund me only a very small portion of the extra...

Service was sporadic , we never had the same waiter twice, we had to put our hands up like in school to get any attention. The waiter tried to be smart and not have a pad to write our order down. Result? Came back 3 times to clarify the order . In our group the pizzas were fine but I made the big mistake of ordering the lasagna bianca with sausage and truffle. My word for 26.50 what a sad piece I got (see photo, yes that is the real size). The top layer had been incinerated to a crisp. As it was also a corner piece two sides were chewy verging on crunchy, for some pieces you needed the back teeth to break it down. I reckon about 4cm cubed of the piece was edible. Of course with waiting staff frequently disappearing into the cavernous interior there was no point complaining. Let’s be honest if the “chef” has let that through the pass and the waiters say nothing as they receive it you know they think that is ok fodder for the non Italians. A massive...