Stella, Cucina Al Forno — Restaurant in Ensenada

This place needs to get their servers some basic training on how to treat the guest, the guest that's paying the bill. On august 26th around 530pm myself and my wife stop there to try the food since every time we drive by is always busy so I said let's check it out. So we got a table wait about 15 minutes to get a drink then finally our server show up no name no hello nothing just what you want,anyways we decided to order the clams and the new York stake food took a while but it was ok and the food was decent but since that server drop the food on the table he never check on us run out of water ice tea etc... we contact other server to get our attention to get our drinks refill and clean up the table, mean while our server was horse-playing and not been professional. And the very bad last thing when we paid our bill and got our card back he just throw it back to us on the table and not saying anything that...

The two dishes I had were good, but in no way authentic Italian food. First I had the bruschetta, which contained more chunks of mozzarella cheese than tomatoes. It also lacked seasoning and was swimming in balsamic. For my entree I ordered the carbonara. It was swimming in cream and butter, neither of which are ingredients in carbonara. Again it was good, but not really carbonara, more like Alfredo with prosciutto in it. I should have sent it back because my body doesn’t always agree with cream and this was no exception. I was sick for 24 hours. My fault for not returning it. Service was good at first, but I ordered a second glass of wine which didn’t come until I was almost done with my meal and it took over 20 minutes for the check to come after we asked for it, twice. The pizzas looked good as did a few other items coming out of the kitchen. I will go back, but I’ll stick to the things they do...

Beware: Expect to pay ~14% above menu prices if you use an American credit card.

Stella will not charge an American credit card in pesos. Instead they use their own lousy exchange rate to charge the card in dollars. The last time we were there that resulted in about a 14% surcharge over menu prices when our card was charged in pesos.

We spend a lot of time in Ensenada and regularly use our charge cards at restaurants. This is the only restaurant we've been to that socks it to American customers and won't allow payments in pesos.

It's too bad because the food and service are very good, but we won't be going back to Stella.

To owner - The difference between our current CC exchange rate and the amount you charged last night is 14%. The charge shows up as dollars on my card, rather than the pesos shown for other purchases yesterday. If you're not doing the conversion then your bank is...