La Passione — Restaurant in Cotswold District

Visited La Passione in Cirencester for our silver wedding meal based on the very good reviews we had read.

The Breaded Mushroom starter was very nice, but after that it all went downhill.

The Lasagne was a ball of dry pasta totally lacking any meat or bechamel sauce , you would do far better buying the lasagne ready meal from Tesco, far superior in taste and quality.

I had the Seafood Linguini after reading a 5 star customer review who praised the meal. It was poor the seafood consisted of about 5 tiny prawns 5 0r 6 mussels, and three rings of calamari.

There was plenty of food in the dish, but that is easy as pasta costs pennies.

I ordered a draught pint of Hobgoblin, and was served a bottle of Hobgoblin Ruby beer costing £5.25 this is sold at Tesco and Lidl for £1.25, the glass of pinot Grigio was £7.35.

Now I dont expect to pay supermarket prices for drinks served in a restaurant but £12.60 for one of the cheapest beers that Hobgoblin produce and a basic pinot grigio is taking liberties.

Having eaten in restaurants across Europe and beyond, I dont mind paying for good food and service, but £62 for 2 drinks and 2 bowls of underwhelming pasta is very disappointing for our silver wedding anniversary meal.

If you are wondering why we did not complain at the time, there was only myself and my wife in the restaurant at 9pm, the closed sign had already been put on the door, and it was quite obvious that the staff were waiting to go home, we were happy to leave as well.

When visiting a restaurant I expect to be served better food than I can cook at home, or buy as a ready meal, extremely...

When you spend two weeks in England, you can't always just eat in pubs. That's why we decided to visit the Italian restaurant. Very friendly welcome, the restaurant was already full. Nevertheless, we got a table straight away. The selection on the menu leaves nothing to be desired. It has everything you could wish for at an Italian restaurant. There's even a Negroni on the drinks menu as an aperitif. That's great class. And it also tastes much better than in many places in Italy itself. We chose spaghetti Bolognese and an avocado and prawn dish for starters and a pizza and chicken with mushrooms and cream sauce for the main course. Everything was freshly prepared and tasted excellent. I love Italian restaurants and visit them regularly all over the world. This one is now one of my favourites. A very special thank you goes to Matteo. He mainly served us in the evening and was obviously in charge when the patron (I think he's Italian?) went home. Matteo not only did a great job, but also showed and taught the probably new, young employees various things. That made a fantastic impression. You wish you had employees like that and unfortunately they are far too rare. Thank you for a great evening with you,...

In the area for a few days and is now typical, we try to find a local independent Italian restaurant. The food was tasty, well presented, good portion size and obviously fresh. The menu’s pretty broad with good options. If you don’t fancy pasta, risotto or any or anything off the ‘secondi’ section then there’s always pizza! The starters and desserts had half dozen or so options. During our visit there was ‘special’ too

There were 5-6 staff working. For the number of people in (18:30-20:30 Tuesday evening in Nov) it felt like twice the amount needed. This resulted in the staff hanging around a corner of the restaurant not looking particularly happy to be there. Service generally was very good but the ‘mood’ wasn’t unnoticed by either me or my partner, I heard the table of people next to us also make comments about ‘interrupting the girls’

Despite this slight (and only negative) I’d recommend a visit and will go back myself if I’m ever in the area again.

Free car park close by made the...