L'ulivo Charing Cross - Italian Restaurant — Restaurant in London

GF was craving Italian so I had a google search for the best Italian food nearby and it directed us to L'ulivo. We went to the one on Villiers Street opposite Charing Cross Station on a cold rainy Tuesday early evening. We walked in as (what looked like) the branch manager was also walking in. She grabbed two menus and walked us to a table right away. She literally walked up to the table, slapped the menus down and went off. Strike 1.

Place looks like it's family run, you can kinda tell. We waited and then took an order, two lasagnas, some garlic bread, an appletiser and a berry mojito. We waited a short while. They brought out an appletiser and a coca-cola. We told them that wasn't the drinks order. They took the coke back and then our food came out shortly after. About 60% of the way through our meal the manager brings a coke again. We tell her it's the wrong order, and then we wait another age for the drink. Strike 2. I then had to get up from my meal, go to the bar and I was impeded by the waiter. I was trying to get a straw for the super-late berry mojito. That berry mojito was just juice and grenadine...

Lasagna was decent, and the garlic bread wasn't very garlic-y at all. A shame. The third waitress to serve us took our payment. We decided to remove the service charge, to which she replied 'was something wrong with the service today?' Haha if only she had a few mins to spare I would have told her!

Overall verdict: Decent to below-average food, mid-level price about £55 for everything. Decent ambience. Bad service but I will give them the benefit of the doubt on a busy Tuesday in central London. I don't envisage it's always like this, because it was pretty woeful. I don't usually write reviews but this was so...

First review in a long time This was the absolute worse experience in customer service, quality of food and management. Ordered two appetizers which the calamari was from frozen and the tartar sauce out of a bottle Ordered a pasta, pizza and Caesar salad. Caesar salad the chicken was cold and dry, croutons were stale and the dressing was something from also out of a bottle. Pizza was burned but solved that problem with oil and vinegar. Now here is the kicker, the pasta was the wrong pasta, manager said give me 5 minutes and we will get you a new one. Waitress came back after 7 minutes to apologize as she acknowledged that she did indeed Had the ordered punched in wrong. We waiting for another 21 minutes, nobody came to check on drinks or letting us know what was happening with the pasta. My wife who ordered the pasta by this time had eaten half the pizza and wasn’t gingery anymore. Manager came by again and saw the pasta was not out yet, ran to the kitchen (which you can see from the dining) yelled something to the cook which at this point I knew he forgot to reorder the pasta. I waved him down but didnt come and I said cancel the pasta. 7 minutes later the pasta showed up and not with the manager or our waitress. We sat for 5 more minutes till we saw someone else and asked for the bill. Pasta was taken off. No apology or any acknowledgement about this experience. Extremely disappointed, you could totally tell that this was the culture at the restaurant. No attention to detail or customer service. Save your money and spend it somewhere else ex at home because you can cook it way better...

Food was mediocre, for an Italian restaurant we had to send back the pasta. We had to wait about an hour before food arrived after we ordered, and two of the orders were wrong, one didn't turn up and like i said pasta had to be sent back. The serving staff were either extremely miserable and/or couldn't speak English, making it overly hard to order and even after ordering it was incorrect or didn't turn up. One of the serving staff was extremely rude to one of our table members, who was the oldest member of the table with being 89, she refused to believe she took the order incorrect and berated him for standing up for himself and explaining that he did in fact order something else, another member of our table stood up for him as the staff member started to become more hostile. Even drinks took along time to even be served, they were good drinks but not worth the money. The staff member,who couldn't speak English, when we ordered one drink (a white Russian) proceeded to ask 4 times if its a white coffee, even though its on their menu. This did not turn up, and they still put it on the bill. The environment was very overwhelming, there were too many tables upstairs and it was overcrowded, nobody was being seated downstairs even when its practically impossible to move, even for the staff. you couldn't move without knocking into someone, even in the middle of a pandemic. Extremely loud, we came home with headaches, don't waste your time going there. Still in shock from how appalling the...