Bella Italia - South Kensington — Restaurant in London

Sadly, for such a high rated restaurant, this place was a huge let down. We ended up waiting for more than an hour to be served 2 pizzas which didn’t even taste too good.

We went on a Saturday evening, when it was full. The manager was very kind and found us a table, we ordered, got our drinks and started waiting for the food. We saw people that came in after us, had to wait for tables, getting their food and eating it, yet we weren’t getting ours. The table next to us even had some problem with one of their pizzas and got a new one, yet we were still waiting. After an hour of waiting we signaled to the waiter, who didn’t bother to ask us anything for the full hour we were waiting and was moving so much we had to try multiple times to get his attention, he came to us he had the gall ask if we were done. It turns out he had forgotten to put our order in all together, when we told him we didn’t even get our food he acted surprised and went to check on the computer. At this point I was properly pissed off, but he didn’t even come back to apologize, he send the polite manager lady to apologize in his stead and she offered us drinks on the house while we wait for our order to actually be prepared, but we declined. When the pizzas finally came, they weren’t even as good as expected. I ordered the Formaggio pizza and I couldn’t recommend it less. The “tomato” based tasted like cheap sweet ketchup which clashed terribly with the salty cheese. The overly sweet with salty combination was absolutely disastrous and were I not so hungry I probably would not have been able to eat more than a slice. This place proved to by Italian just in name, as what was served would probably offend any real Italian. The nice lady did offer us a 25% off our bill at the end, but they still put a 3£ service charge. Maybe everything being so overpriced would have been ok if the food was any good, but as it was it definitely wasn’t worth the price.

What was worse, since there wasn’t much to do while we wait, we were looking around and we saw the waiter take out a bag of trash out the front door, no gloves or anything, then come right back inside and go to the cutlery drawer and start organizing clean forks and knives in their respective place. After that, he took the cheese and grater and grated some cheese on the food for another table. All this with unwashed hands after handling a trash bag. I would have liked to point this out to him, but he was so busy running around that he didn’t pay us any mind for a full hour, apparently he’s also too busy to wash his hands which looks like a health hazard for all the people using the cutlery or having cheese grated on top of their pasta by him.

The only reasons this isn’t 1 star is because the lady did really try to make it up to us in the end but it was...

Terrible experience from one of the staff. Me and my sister in law went for a meal during the day there, the fries I ordered didn't come so I had to ask for them again. Then, my sister in law pays by the scanner, we leave and the Male waiter comes running at us as we're just casually walking to an appointment I had, he's screaming "MISS NO GOODBYE?? NO WAVE GOODBYE NOTHING" he's red in the face, then aggressively is yelling at us in the street that we didn't pay, so we're trying to show and explain we did. (I would also like to add, usually we do thank the waiter but no one working there was on the restaurant floor after we paid and we waited for a few minutes to see if anyone would come out to say thank you) He orders us to come back to the restaurant, we follow as he MARCHES infront of us, speeding off. As we get into the restaurant, BOOM the payment goes through, and the female waiter who looked like the manager even said "it's okay there's bad (wifi and data) service in here, it's just gone through". After all those theatrics, we did NOT get an apology from him, and he continued to act unprofessionally. Couldn't be more dissatisfied. The female worker was very friendly and dealt with the situation accordingly. Absolutely horrific way to deal with customers, A grown man chasing after two girls in the street and yelling at them being aggressive, when all it was, was a misunderstanding. He could have easily stopped us politely to ask if we'd paid for to say the transaction hadn't gone through and we need to come back. But he didn't. He seemed to have some sort of prejudice towards us...

There's a specific role that this sort of restaurant plays in big cities. The headline is, don't go here unless you've got a Taste Card or some other discount, or if you could see yourself as among the very happy families with young kids who were happily noshing down cheesy garlic bread after a trip to the Natural History Museum, and just need something consistent and familiar. Otherwise there are loads of other better Italian places in the vicinity if you want proper "dining". Food is fine, if a bit pricey (I wouldn't pay full price) and the service was fine, if slightly patronising and sadly playing into that slightly tired stereotype of the overly gregarious Italian waiter - without the authenticity of this being a family owned place with real persobality. There was some confusion over a drink I ordered from the menu which the restaurant wasn't ready to serve (!) which I didn't find out until a very different one landed on my table. Waiter tried to explain the situation away instead of trying to rectifying it. The table next to us described the situation as "a bit Fawlty Towers". And a very unnverving robot takes your booking over the phone. All put together, a totally forgettable eating experience from a faceless big chain. It's the sort of place you go when you need food as a means (ie fuel), not an end in itself. We achieved our aim of filling up with a quick dinner before a night at the Proms...