Caffé Florian Taipei — Restaurant in Xinyi District

I ate here with my family on a Sunday night. We actually raced here to try to make our reservation on time, just got there on time and then it turned out to be dead. There were plenty of seats available.

I found the menu somewhat limited. There were maybe five appetizers to choose from six pasta dishes and six entrees. First of all, there were no appetizers that was I interested in. I ended up getting a fried oyster appetizer. That was actually excellent but that was the last one they had so no one else at the table could get it too.

For the entree I ended up getting the spaghetti with pepper and cheese. I have to say it was really outstanding. Perfectly cooked pasta with a very rich flavorful sauce and steaming hot. I also got the slow cooked pork which was also really good. So I was happy with the quality of my dishes. My daughter I remember got the sausage dish though and it tasted more like a Chinese sausage than an Italian sausage. I thought that one could have been better.

Negatives: The service leaves something to be desired. First it was very slow. Dishes come out at a glacial pace. We probably spent 3 hours there and as I said, there were very few other customers to service. They were slow to refill our water and they literally gave up doing that about 3/4 of the way through our meal. My son also got the beef entree for his third course and that literally came out about 30 minutes after everyone else's dish. We were just waiting and waiting for it to arrive. We had to ask the staff several times to make sure they hadn't forgotten. So be prepared to spend a...

We ordered cafe and tea, etc. Everything was quite ok; they had a violin player there playing popular songs, which was nice. The bad experience came towards the end of things: there is a 3-scoop ice cream with expresso sauce on the menu (NT 250), and we asked: could we just order one scoop, waiter: yes, its NT 100, we asked: it comes with expeesso sauce as well? waiter: no, but you can top up another NT 160 for that. Huh? did I hear it correctly? As we gave feedback while walking out to the male manager in suits, he was worse. I.e. at least the waiter was polite, the manager simply said: yes, of course if you don't want to have 3 scoops, we can you one scoop with expresso sauce, but the charge remains the same... I can only say, they just lost us as a repeat customer, but not that they...

Came in the afternoon on a weekend which was naturally busy. However, no matter how busy a place may be, it's common courtesy to at least acknowledge a waiting customer at the door and let them know that you'll be with them momentarily. None of these things happened at this location with several wait staff obviously aware of my presence at the entrance and either willfully ignoring me and several other waiting customers or just hated their jobs that much. Either way, it took at least 5 minutes before someone finally came to say that there would be at least a 30 minute wait for a table. Total, epic customer service fail. I don't even care what their food tastes like at this point with this type of poor...