Ornella's Kitchen — Restaurant in Tameside

I am truly shocked and disappointed by the poor service and lack of care we experienced at this restaurant today. I am leaving this review to express my frustration and to warn others about the treatment we received.

To be fully transparent, we arrived 7 minutes late for our booking, which had a 1.5-hour time limit, meaning we needed to finish by 4:00 PM. Despite this, it took the staff 36 minutes after our arrival to bring out the starters, and a staggering 56 minutes to serve the main courses. By the time the mains arrived, we only had 24 minutes left to eat.

To make matters worse, it was my partner’s birthday, and I had called ahead to arrange something special. The restaurant confirmed they would bring out a dessert with a candle for her. However, instead of honoring this promise, they simply brought the bill. When I asked why they didn’t offer us dessert, the staff coldly replied, “The time is up, sorry.” When I questioned why the food took so long, they blamed it on the kitchen being busy.

Because of their delays, we were unable to enjoy dessert or the birthday surprise they had promised. The staff’s response was dismissive and unapologetic, with comments like, “I’m sorry, what do you want us to do?” This level of care—or lack thereof—is simply unacceptable.

To add insult to injury, the owner came over and reiterated their 90-minute policy while admitting that the kitchen was busy. They took no real responsibility for the delays or the ruined birthday surprise. It was shocking to hear them say, “Oh, we wrote that down, but…” as if it didn’t matter.

While the food itself was good, the experience was completely ruined by the rude and unprofessional staff, the excessive delays, and the lack of accountability. Unless you enjoy being rushed through your meal, treated poorly, and having special occasions ignored, I would not recommend this restaurant. They clearly do not value...

Having visited on numerous occasions plus having done takeout I can safely say the food is worth it. It’s one of the best pasta places in Manchester.

The 3 stars I’m giving are to give some constructive feedback on the service which is hit and miss mainly on the weekend.

Tables are always running late on the weekend, which I can understand. However, it’s cheeky to keep reminding people they’ve got 5-10mins left on a table when it was already 20mins late getting it to you. This tends to happen on the weekends where I’m assuming the owner isn’t around to help manage and there isn’t a manager or supervisor to keep an eye on things. I didn’t complain at the time as I actually felt sorry for the 2 people covering it as they are clearly inexperienced and didn’t want to overwhelm them

If you’re late getting the table to the guests, orders should be taken quickly if you want to enforce a time limit. On one occasion our table was late despite having booked and it took ages to get anyone’s attention to order. If it takes 15-20mins to get someone seated and another 15-20mins to take their order that’s already a good chunk of their allocated time that’s been taken up

on takeout orders there’s always been something missing like a dip ie the ravioli is missing the pesto or arancini is missing the honey. It’s not a big deal but it’s annoying when you only realise when you get home and probably points to some mismanagement when it comes to...

We’d seen a number of reels and posts on Instagram raving about the food at Ornella’s and after managing to get a much sought-after lunch reservation, we can attest the hype is very much real! The food is honestly some of the best Italian food I’ve ever had—the wild garlic, spinach and mozzarella arancini with parmesan sauce was definitely the best arancini I’d ever had. I’m honestly still dreaming about the food, and desperately want another reservation before the menu changes. There wasn’t anything we didn’t enjoy, and we ordered a starter, small pasta and main size pasta each. In hindsight, we probably wouldn’t order the parmesan, truffle fries again as a side to share, just because it was a lot of carbs, but I did enjoy dipping them in my ravioli truffle pasta sauce. We weren’t sure if the portions were going to be generous but they definitely were. In the future I’d either order 2 small pasta dishes, or just 1 main, hopefully we’d be able to eat dessert then. The staff were incredibly kind though and allowed us to order desserts to take away, so we took the tiramisu which was enormous and quite creamy like a super soft cake. A bit less coffee flavour than I’m used to, but still delicious. It was honestly just a 10/10 experience, the only reason I put 4/5 for the atmosphere is because it’s a little small, and since a couple people had buggies it made the otherwise cosy venue a...