Pentole&Padelle — Restaurant in London

I loved it. Food is fresh and service is friendly. If you are looking for an authentic Italian food experience, this is highly recommended.

My family came to visit me and I brought them to Pentole&Padelle and I must say it is the best restaurant I tried that week. Starting from the food, I could immediately notice that the ingredients were fresh and well picked (very well done for choosing high quality suppliers): tomatoes actually tested like tomatoes and not watery red stuff, pasta was clearly made fresh and with eggs. We were 5 in total and each of us took a different dish so we tried a bit of everything and there was nothing I can complain about. Domenico - the manager - was great: extremely friendly, welcoming and passionate about the restaurant and Italian traditions. He explained to us the concept of the restaurant itself, about sharing dishes and he also gave us good advice about what to order. The only tiny problem with the service was the waiter who was clearly new and not very confident. Sometimes he had things mixed up or was a bit messy with removing plates and setting up for the next course. Also it would have been great to have the parmesan left on the table, after having it sprinkled on the pasta, but this had no big impact on our great experience. The place itself is very nice, very cosy and gave me the feeling of being back in Italy. If the tables were a bit further from each other it would have been even perfect, but overall great. I worked in hospitality for almost 10 years and I must say that this level of management is quite...

Not entirely sure what people are raving about. Yes the food is fresh and authentic but that's about it. There is some significant room for improvement on two key areas in my opinion.

1. Service - We had booked a table outdoor for 5 and when we arrived (on time) there weren't 5 seats available outside. The owner ended up pushing together 2 small square metal tables with 2 chairs on one side and 3 on the other! It was not comfortable and it felt like hadn't we requested an extra table when the people at the table next to us left, they would have expected us to spend the whole evening like that. Whilst sitting outside, it is also extremely hard to get attention and receive service from staff. A curtain is blocking the view from the inside of the restaurant resulting in us having to stand up multiple times to ask staff inside when we needed something. That was rather unpleasant.
2. Portion size / price - Again the food was tasty and the price was fair but pasta portions were tiny, clearly inadequate for dinner time. The lasagna I had ordered was the size of a deck of playing cards. Even the tiramisu I had for dessert was bigger. And it was the same feeling around the table with the spaghetti with 4 meatballs and seafood pasta that my parents were sharing which would have been more suited for one eater. A shame as the concept was promising but, without the improvements suggested, we won't...

Asians get Italian food - it is meant to be shared at the table so we can argue if we like a dish or not. That shared experience makes the food, goes beyond just satisfying an appetite but feeds the soul and the heart of the family. We get it. Sadly most Italian restaurants pander to the norm of individual dishes. P&P is one of the few exceptions that encourage large portions to share up to 4 persons. 11 of us,3 generations, shared their large table at the back on a noisy convivial Sat evening for a birthday meal. We had shared starters of burrata tomato salad, parmigiana, calamari, gnocchi, garlic bread, zucchini fritters. Large pans of perfectly cooked al dente pasta followed to share and fight over. Recommend the bucatini with guanciale, but the prawn linguine and carbonara were authentically made as was the pizza (consider one of his best he has eaten by a very fussy boy). Their house red Sangiovese went down well too. Service was friendly, efficient and relaxed. Pentole & Padelle is an authentic Italian cuccina like ones we have visited throughout Italy. Right now, this is the place for a communal food experience in...