La Meridiana — Restaurant in Guildford

Terrible experience thank goodness for good company otherwise it would of been awful!

It took 4 HOURS for our group to have a quick pizza and drink after work. I understand a group booking can take longer but for 9 people you should be able to serve pizzas quicker than an hour and a half from ordering. The entirety of the restaurant had been served before us even though we were one of the first to order due to booking the table early.

Once threaten by the group walking out if they couldn’t serve the food by 8.45pm (bearing in mind we had been there since 6pm) they confessed to burning the first set of pizzas. Eventually 8 out of the 9 pizzas arrived and were great nothing fancy or particularly special but by this time we were all starving. The 9th pizza then arrive burnt and rock hard unable to even get a steak knife through the dough so unfortunately had to be send back. Very quickly they then produced a replacement which was fine again nothing fancy or particularly special but sufficed.

During the long wait drinks were ordered and forgotten about often needing several reminders before they brought them over.

They still had the cheek to add 12.5% service charge onto the bill which was non removable. The only reason for giving this restaurant 1 star is they removed our drinks from the bill and put them on the house which was appreciated. Once it got to actually paying we had to ask several times can we pay before they eventually brought the card machine over 45 minutes later.

We have been here before just 2 of us and it has always been wonderful hence the reason of coming tonight. It may just be this restaurant is not well suited to larger groups and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to a party size over 4...

This restaurant is set in a beautiful place and looks wonderful. My wife is Italian and we thought we'd take our son there to enjoy a meal as a family. It was simply awful. the seafood for the mains and calamari for the starter were frozen, I had the veal milanese which was so tough I couldn't eat more than half, the tomato sauce on the spaghetti tasted like heinz. My wife ordered a risotto which was watery and flavourless, we both needed to add salt to every course which is something we try not to do. Our 6 yr old had a margehrita pizza which I'm sure he made himself at school and the ice cream I'm sure was from poundland. The spoon I was given was sticky on the mouthpiece and when I asked if I could have a replacement, the guy who worked there snatched it from me and put it with the others in the same pot as the clean ones and dropped another one from that pot on the table in front of me with a bang. we payed £113.00 (we had no alcohol, just 2 cokes and a juice) for that meal which was ultimately inedible. My wife did not want me to leave this review as she feels that times are hard for the catering industry which I agree with but I feel that when you pay this much money, there is an expectation which should be met. I genuinely cannot understand how this place has such high reviews, it's not good at all. the only saving grace was we had a very nice waiting person who seemed to be new and was learning the job. The rest of the experience was unforgiveable. It blows my mind to think that such basic meals can't be cooked well and that the value in central London is...

Terrible service, bland food. My table for 2 waited 1 hour and 10 minutes for our main course. It got to an hour when we asked where our food was, and was told that "they are nearly finished with the table of ten inside, then they would get to us" (we were eating outside). Bear in mind, there was a table of 10 inside and 5 tables outside, that doesn't justify waiting over an hour for food. Other diners outside waited even longer, and a family were joking that it would be faster to walk to the Budgens next door, eat, and come back. Even after all that waiting, the food was mediocre at best. I ordered branzino with shrimp, it came with two pieces of shrimp and one empty head. My partner ordered the risotto which tasted fine but was not worth the hour wait. I then ordered the chocolate cake which came cold.

Overall, it was not worth it for the price (which was roughly £80 for two dinks, two mains and one dessert). The service was terrible, and I don't know exactly know what happened to cause this issue of having to wait an hour for food. We were not offered any apology for the wait and was only given the "reason" when we asked why we haven't received our food.

By the other outstanding reviews of this restaurant I was very disappointed but I hope this was just a one off problem, however, I would not...