Lettera 22 — Restaurant in Madrid

Let me start with saying: if you’ve been to Italy and enjoyed the food there, avoid this place. It is nothing like it.

The wine was good and the restaurant is cute. But that’s pretty much the only good things I can say about Lettera 22.

The service was awful and neglectful. Four servers hanging out at the bar, ignoring me and my partner most of the evening by making us wait a long time to take our order, to bring our bill, and then take our payment.

The food was the worst part though. We started with a plantain gnocchi with parmeggiano sauce. It was a gamble to order it, and I’m sad to report: it didn’t work out. It just tasted like fried bananas with a parmeggiano cheese sauce. The peanuts on it made no sense and added nothing to the dish, but the whole thing was a strange flavour combination that just failed to come together.

For our mains, we ordered a mediocre bolognese and a devastating amatricciana that was a completely different dish than the one you’d expect. Instead of crispy guanciale, you get braised pork. And instead of a silky emulsified sauce, you get a slow-braised pork/tomato dish with undissolved pecorino. The bolognese tasted ok, but only by comparison to rest of this miserable meal, even though the fresh-made pappardelle had noodles that were undercooked and glued together.

I was excited to try this place and really wanted to like it. But given the terrible service, the high price, and the low quality food, it was an absolute disaster that left me with a bad taste in my mouth. We spent €60 for the worst meal of our entire three weeks travelling in Spain.

I can’t recommend this...

The restaurant’s ambience is a good mix of casual-cool and chic. We ordered the burrata with pesto as a starter and it was really good. As for main plates, the fresh truffle spaghetti was amazing, one of the best dishes we ever had — the fresh truffle was great and in good quantity, the parmigiano reggiano sauce was delicious. The crispy lasagna, however okay, was a bit of a disappointment. The bolognese sauce was good, but the “crispy” part of the name is not a gratin or anything of the sort. The pasta itself is fried and crunchy. Wasn’t what I expected of a lasagna and not in the best way. The tiramisu was good as well. The service was good in general, except we felt like we were being rushed the entire time. We ordered the entrée and before we were done the main dishes arrived and were forced upon us. Not only this is offputting, it’s also a questionable practice. I had white wine with the entrée and intended to switch over to red for the main dish, but because they were rushing us so much, I ended up having only the one glass of wine. This is not great for people who love relishing a meal and ordering more food/wine as you go. Overall a good restaurant to go to have a nice dinner in a cool ambience. If you go, order the truffle spaghetti. It was the...

My family and I had a very disappointing experience at this restaurant. We arrived at 8:49 and were seated immediately, but our food came out at 9:57. That is over an hour wait for our meals. Mind you 4 tables were seated and served after we ordered including a large group. All that waiting just for the food to taste terrible. It looked good but tasted shockingly bad. My sisters ordered the carbonara, I tried it and it was disgusting. Seriously disgusting. I’m not a picky eater but I wouldn’t even finish that. My sisters couldn’t eat it and had to leave it there. I ordered the fettuccine fresche allá nduja and burrata and it had no flavour whatsoever. I’m not exaggerating, a random couple that was seated next to us came up to our table as they were leaving and told us about how badly they felt because of how long we had to wait. They came into the restaurant after us, but got served and ate their food before us. The couple apologised to us even though they are literally customers themselves. Also, they said it was some of the wor st Italian food they ever had. One of the meals they ordered was the carbonara, which they left barely touched at the table. I will mention that we were they only Bla ck peo ple in the restaurant...