ALFI Italian Cocktail Bar & Restaurant Spitalfields — Restaurant in London

My first one star review of the year. I eat out A LOT and this is one of the worst places (bottom 3) I've been to since I moved to London and have eaten at over 400 spots.

It appears most of the ratings come from accounts with 1 or just several reviews, which makes makes me question the validity of the high ratings. Yes, Google reviews can be bought and it's truly a crisis in London.

Absolutely abysmal food.

Service was also really crap - I do think they intentioned to try, but the waitress wasn't really English fluent (also quite scatterbrained, we had to repeat our orders twice, and finally (for good measure) had her read them out for us the third time as she kept on bumbling during the order. That was fine, maybe she was new. She, however, really did not know how to deal with the gluten free person in our party.

Despite a lot of the items on the menu saying gluten free, they insisted that there's high levels of cross contamination on everything. Our guest said she's okay with some levels of cross contamination, and offered some alternatives and options (we discussed this with the waitress for about 10 minutes or so), but the waitress did not seem to understand - saying everything was off limits with the exception of the burrata and tomatoes. It took a lot of convincing to get her to agree to serve the fish.

I think the staff should not intervene to this degree as they don't know the severity of the intolerance or preference, and insist someone not get certain items. However, this made us pretty uncomfortable and feel very fussy. The waitress' English was not great so probably the source of some of the miscommunication.

Then the food - first starter came out after 20 minutes of waiting in zero order... one person got their mains 15 minutes after the other and was just a timing mess.

Also we never got the focaccia we ordered. We mentioned it and the waitress just muttered "oh sorry" and moved on. 🤷🏻‍♀️

The fennel salad had zero seasoning, was literally just raw chopped fennel. We hardly touched it.

The seabass was served like the picture, almost thrown together in haphazard fashion.

The pizza with ham and burrata was literally a sauceless bread with some prosciutto thrown on. I suppose that was my mistake ordering. A third of the pizza was blackened and charred below too, not a good texture.

All the pasta dishes we ordered came like they were just thrown together - you can see the state of the Ragu (all sauce and looks like a soupy mess). I didn't take pictures closeup because they looked like plated in such a rush, there was no beauty or symmetry in the presentation. Like gloop on plates.

They told us they do not make the pasta fresh as well. Crab ravioli had no flavour, same with the ragu, one piece of meat in the whole bowl. Tasted like Tesco microwave food. The presentation was just all terrible for everything.

The only thing that was passable in terms of flavour was the fennel sausage, which was alright, but served barely warm and would have been much better hot.

Overall, terrible experience. Absolutely avoid. We also booked on a Fork offer for 50% off but the fine print (which is not on the order page but in the 'restaurant description') says that booking through The Fork is only for a certain small part of the menu (which I'm still not sure which part, it's intentionally opaque). We were okay to pay full price for everything and didn't fuss, but very disingenuous and shady. Especially paired with the abysmal state of food and...

Nice visual atmosphere and good location, with fun recreational activities such as table tennis, boules, and a photobooth. However, that’s about all the positives there are to state.

Firstly, we were not assigned one singular waiter even though, as a large group reservation, that would seem like the most usual and typical thing to do. Took a good while for our drinks order to even be taken and then, upon explaining that some of our party would not be drinking alcohol and henceforth did not have any ID to produce, the service instantly changed.

One of our waiters became cold and had an attitude - we were not given a name, but she was notably wearing a Juicy Couture tracksuit, which frankly made her look unprofessional and is not something I’ve ever seen a waitress wear. All other staff were in all black formal attire. One of the meals had a hair in it and, when sent back, was returned within 5 minutes, which makes me think they did not have any care to resolve the hygiene issue properly, and just tossed the same meal into a microwave. When we then asked to comp the meal off the bill, the same waitress said ‘I didn’t know anything about [the hair]’ and did not formally apologise for the issue. Other meals were fine, but incredibly small portions and nothing to compliment. None of our party were satisfied with their meals.

We discussed the option to take service charge off our bill but when it came to paying (which we had to chase down 3 different waiters to do) we were handed a card machine with no further discussion and, again, no mention of the hair pasta.

What was meant to be a nice birthday meal felt like a fast food chain with mediocre service and fairy lights. First time visiting, definitely not...

I was just looking for a quick lunch with a friend and stumbled across this place which I think is an independent and is doing some really great food. I had the beef ragu with papparadelle. The beef shin ragu was cooked to perfection with a rich flavour and al dente pasta. The venue is really spacious but still really warm and inviting.

The service was great and the food came out super quick. It was a really laid back atmosphere and we felt really looked after. We ended up staying for ages and shared a tiramisu which was off the chain. It was super creamy and very decadent.

We spoke to the waiter for a while and found out they had lots of natural wines, some of which are actually completely classic grapes and flavours but just low or no intervention rather than the funky all natural stuff. They still have some adventurous bottles as well which is cool and you can try the wine at the bar so you don’t have to commit to a bottle or glass before buying. The more classic taps are still natural though which is very cool. Its not actually a new style of making wine, rather just going back to an old style of making wine which has been overtaken by the mass produced stuff which is full of preservatives.

We stayed for coffees and chatted for ages. The location is great, really close to Liverpool street and right in the middle of Spitalfields market. You can walk there easily from the station and there is a great outside terrace you can watch the world go by. Great vibes, thanks for...