Urban Gusto — Restaurant in North Island

On the menu board..." Classic Italian dishes, with NZ flavors " (Not exact words)

Put it this way....what was on their menu, looked nice on their menu. Including the price. Which was either the same or slightly cheaper than what you'd pay at La Porchetta, for example. We ordered a pizza and Spaghetti and meatballs, with a fizz and a rum n coke.

However, my partner and I both felt that the food could have been alot better. The meals looked like they had been rushed. Both in taste and how they looked. The pizza was soggy, the meatballs were dry, some of the toppings tasted like they were a day or 2 old. Hell, even the rum n coke didn't seem right. A single shouldn't taste like double. (and their version of a tall glass was questionable too)

Would have expected that from a B/C grade restaurant/takeaway, not here.

I don't recommend this place!

Cheaply priced, Cheaply made. The place itself looked cheap aswell.

I will say though, that the waitress, who I assume was new because she looked nervous as hell, and btw, was getting no support whatsoever from any of the other staff, did an awesome job. She was polite, courteous and friendly. (Unlike all the...

Ordered an anti-pasti for starter. A lot of bread, tiny amount of pesto, 3 slices of salami, 3 of prosciutto, lots of beetroot and pickled garlic, some artichoke hearts and cauliflower The prosciutto had a peice of bone in it and was very gristley. Pickled garlic made everything taste like garlic and was not nice. The garlic and prosciutto were chewed up and spat back out onto the plate, unfortunately. Had to wait nearly 20 mins for this to be cleared.

Had gluten-free carbonara and spaghetti and meatballs for main. Carbonara was okay, nothing to rave about. Tomato sauce for the spaghetti had little to no flavour, and the meatballs didn't taste or feel fresh. Potentially my tastebuds were still dying from the picked garlic I ate off thr anti-pasti.

Service was relatively unnatentive, and we saw the manager treating the lovely young waitress with disregard and was being quite disrespectful to her.

Paid almost authentic Italian prices for not very authentic food.

We weren't asked at any stage how the food was, and I'm wondering if they knew it wasn't great.

Hopefully, we caught them on an off night, and it's...

It’s a shame others seem to have had good food, because ours was not, and the service was so poor anything redeeming about the food was quickly lost.

It took over 20 minutes for us to have our order taken, and then another 40 to have the one drink and two pizzas delivered. Other tables that had been seated after us had their orders taken first and received their food before we even got our order in. The drink was watered down and tasted like nothing the menu described. The pizzas were unbalanced. The pears on the pear and Gorgonzola pizza were under ripe, and half the slices had seeds in them. The mushroom truffle pizza was overloaded with artichokes, causing the dough to be underbaked.

We asked our waitress why the pear salad wasn’t marked as vegetarian, and she didn’t know, but didn’t offer to ask the kitchen or anything, so we just didn’t order it.

A request for share plates was never fulfilled. No one ever checked on us and couldn’t even get someone to pay the check without having to chase someone down.

Would not...