Santi — Restaurant in London

Food was nice but good luck getting the waiting staff to serve you. We went midweek and there were three staff there. None of them showed any interest in serving customers, and were more interested in coordinating their smoking breaks together. We had to flag waiting staff down to 1. Order 2. Point to our food waiting on the pass 3. Get the dishes cleared 4. Get the bill 5. Pay the bill. When I asked the waitress to remove the service charge from the bill she looked at me with pure hatred and didn't acknowledge us when we said goodbye as we left. Such a shame as it could be an excellent venue but I'd suggest going to any of the other restaurants in the Olympic park over this one.

Update - Since posting the management have contacted me directly to apologise and offer a complimentary meal to demonstrate that this experience was not the norm. However, there were still some issues even when we used the voucher to pick up the food (which we booked takeaway). The staff seemed suspicious of our voucher and weren't going to redeem it until I threatened to call the member of the management team on the mobile phone number he had given me. I'm not sure what traumatic customer experience the staff have had previously but the do not treat customers very well. Once they had agreed to honour the voucher, I was treated better (though I think this was more about the staff not wanting me to report this further incident). Unfortunately, I still couldn't recommend...

[UPDATED 14/12/2024] Revised down to 2 stars! There have been several price increases since my last review. The quality and quantity of food has also gone down.

The new pricing means that you will be paying £17 for a carbonara and £24 for a seafood linguine! The portion has also gotten smaller with less sea food and ingredients.

The quality has taken a similar direction, I am pretty sure some of the seafood in the “frutti di mare” were from frozen.

The carbonara was “grainy”. This is typical of overcooking the eggs in the final stages. Such a shame.

What was a great restaurant delivering good food and value has now become a bit of an overpriced trap.

New photos attached!

[Previous Review]

TLDR; very generous portions and good quality ingredients used although food was little under salted. Service was excellent. Would recommend.

Even though it’s not the cheapest Italian restaurant around Stratford, Santi doesn’t skimp on the amount of food and quality of ingredients they use.

We were especially impressed by the king prawns linguine and tiramisu which were both generously portioned. The prawns were cooked perfectly and it over done. However, both pasta dishes we had were a little under salted. Not a big deal as cheese, salt and pepper were available on the side.

The service was polite and not too intrusive which is not something I can say about all...

Mediocre food and service. I went here for the first time last Friday with a friend. We ordered two seafood dishes, 1 glass of wine and 2 cocktails.

Positives: the food is edible. We both finished our meals (we were very very hungry)

Negatives: man at the entrance who seats you will be unfriendly (no hello, no smiles). When we came in, he barely said two words to us, just directed us to sit where we wanted and put the menu in front of us. We knew it wasn’t personally as we watched him address customers that came in after us in the same way.

It will take quite a bit of waiting before your order is taken. After being seated, we waited 20 minutes before we were asked if we wanted to order our drinks. Having waited 20 mins we ordered both our drinks and main meal.

Seafood linguini was DRY and tasteless. It felt like they had just thrown it all together with no salt, pepper, nothing.

For the price and quality of the food, paying £17 for the seafood felt like a rip off. Even Bella Italia (chain restaurant) serve better quality and at a cheaper price.

my friend was still hungry after his meal, so asked for the dessert menu. It took 15 mins of waiting to get the dessert menu. Finally when it did arrive it was small and not well presented.

After a two course meal, we had to go to Waitrose to get some snacks as my friend...