SARTO — Restaurant in Leeds

2nd time trying after a great first visit. Was excited to bring my husband for a meal pre-theatre. Found the ambience lacking, the acoustics of the restaurant are so tinny & loud it can be abit jarring.

Staff were friendly enough but just stood chatting for most of the time, again have no issue with staff chatting but it really did seem like they were just having a big social. May not have helped that there seemed to be so many of them with little tables so stood out more. A guy came over to take our food basically barking at us and felt rushed so he could go back to talking to his pals. But the two others a person with a shaved head & a blonde lady were very attentive & friendly.

The focaccia was very oily, it came with a huge pot of olive oil and balsamic, you had to dip the bread in quite far to get to the balsamic that it was basically dripping with oil. I mentioned this to the waitress and asked if they could give us some with less oil she seemed happy to do so but they seemed confused - talking about it at the kitchen (open kitchen). With 4 of them deciding what to do, she then brought it back and it was honestly like a big pot of balsamic vinegar. It felt like they’d got annoyed about it and just took the piss a bit. Again I could be wrong but they’d dumped some oil out and just poured loads of balsamic in, it looked like tar. Maybe this is a training issue. Just a tip I’d make the dipping bowls shorter (the tallness being abit of an issue with so much oil) and with less oil so you can get a good oil-vinegar dunk ratio. I might be a saddo but bread oil & vinegar is one of my faves. And shouldn’t be hard to get wrong. To be fair reading this back I sound like a weirdo, but if you’d have been there you’d have known what I meant.

Pasta was delicious - nduja & the fettuccini. As was the arancini (great balsamic sauce) pear frangipane.

Will try again as food is great & hopefully would be a better visit. But for £75 was a bit...

All fine - food certainly good but definitely not exceptional. Menu was too confusingly full of obscure ingredients, even for a foodie there was almost one item per dish which I didn't know. This was unnecessarily excluding because in practice all the pasta dishes were very normal, nothing shocking at all. Pasta seemed freshly cooked, which was fine but all our dishes could have done with a bit more zing to keep it interesting to the end of the bowl. It's quite authentically Italian for a pasta bowl to be on the plain-er side, but then a pasta dish would be part of a big meal with other courses. Late dinner (9:30) on a Saturday and it was very quiet - not a bad thing when most other places were too busy or closing at that time. Service VG, friendly and helpful but then there were as many staff as customers at the time. Prices were very reasonable for the area and wine menu was very good and very reasonable...

Really lovely place. Great, friendly service. Our food arrived fast and covid measures were really well maintained. Thank for accommodating us expertly through this tough time

Both mine and my partners meals were perfectly fine. The arancini starter was a highlight, crisp and moorish and packed full of flavour. the focaccia was on the lower end of good but was elevated by brilliant olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The tiramisu was great, Well balanced delicate and indulgent. The problem came with the mains. Fresh pasta is always a delight but both dishes lacked real flavour and texture. The ragu seemed like it was bashed out in a rush. If I could sum up the pasta in one word it would be flat. which is exactly at the time in the meal I was expecting my experience peak.

I'm glad I went and i'll probably go again to give it another go but on this outing I doubt it's gonna...