Juliet Italian Kitchen- Barton Springs — Restaurant in Austin

I’ve lived in Austin for 10 years and have always wanted to try Juliet Italian Kitchen. My mom and I decided to get a late lunch here the other day and, unfortunately, it didn’t live up to the expectations I had, considering this is regarded as a very nice restaurant with authentic Italian food.

Food was just okay. My biggest gripe is that every dish we ordered was served cold or lukewarm at best. Even starting with the bread/oil that we got before we ordered - the bread had good flavor, but had maybe been sitting in the back for awhile. Should’ve at least been warmed before it was served to us.

The bruschetta wasn’t for me. I’m used to having bruschetta where the slices of bread are toasted and served with a cold/cooled diced tomato topping - meant to be refreshing. The bruschetta here was topped with melted mozzarella, WAY too much diced tomato, and a ton of pesto. It was very heavy, which ended up causing the bread to get a bit soggy. Caesar salad was good, it’s hard to screw that up. My entree, the Italian sausage ravioli, was very tasty! But again, it was not warm enough so that dampened my experience.

The service was okay. I will say, the hostesses were very polite. We sat at the bar and were served by the bartender. He was polite, but sometimes seemed frustrated with us, although we didn’t do anything that seemed frustrating from my end. For example, I knew what I wanted to order right away, so I gave him my appetizer/salad/entree order all at once, while my mom was still deciding if she wanted to eat or not (she wasn’t particularly hungry, I was). My salad and bruschetta came out, and then we sat for awhile waiting for my entree. Turns out, he didn’t put it in because he was waiting for my mom’s order. He seemed frustrated by that for some reason once he did put in the order… I don’t like feeling like an inconvenience for that.

My stepdad joined us after work and ordered the bolognese. He said it was just okay, but also not hot enough. My mom did end up ordering the salmon crudo, which was also underwhelming to her - she said it was flavorless. Just a handful of arugula and 5 tiny pieces of salmon.

I really wanted to love this place. Overall, not sure if I’d return. Maybe they had an...

I had noticed that Juliet was not on any of the top lists for Italian restaurants in Austin, but I had never been there, and wanted to experience it for myself. The restaurant is deceptively large, with a lovely outdoor area (dated but loads of potential), and despite having many empty tables both inside and out, we were seated almost as far away as you could be seated, at a high top near the front entry. Our waiter seemed to have only one other table, but was incredibly slow to get to us. The wait for cocktails was ridiculously long, for drinks that were so weak that we each ordered an extra shot to put into it (The waiter accidentally put his fingers in my glass while committing to memory who got what shot. There were only two of us.). We ordered the sharing board... hard to describe how bad this was. It cost $23, and for that we got some raw veggies (sliced avocado, baby bells, rainbow carrots), some vaguely french bread cracker things, two not-good kinds of pickled veggies (one cloyingly sweet and the other tolerable but bland), and what should have been the centerpieces -- a white bean hummus that tasted only of smashed white beans, and what they called a salmon rillette, which in reality must have been a canned salmon salad-type thing. It was fishy and I couldn't tell what was in it. Even worse, the salmon and white bean glops were just that -- huge glops of each, very unappetizing to look at, much less try to eat. We did try though, and just couldn't. We brought it all home, but were worried about giving it to the cats, so ended up throwing it away. The entrees were not any better. My girlfriend had the side of rigatoni and marinara. It tasted like jarred cardboard. I had the shrimp scampi, and it was akin to a Stouffer's frozen entree. The whole meal was best characterized by my girlfriend as a "Cisco special" -- everything was canned or otherwise prepackaged and you knew it. This place could be so great -- the location and existing space have so much potential for very cool ambience, but the service, bartending, drinks and food were all surprisingly terrible. What a shame. (I've never left a restaurant review, but this was such a disappointment! Come on, Juliet folks, you can do...

My family took me here when I visited them in Austin and I was excited to try a seemingly popular Italian restaurant. However, when we got there, they sat us outside in 104 degree heat with nothing to keep us cool, despite the fact that we had a reservation and there were plenty of open tables with fans that they just didn’t sit us at. They lied to us on the phone telling us there were water misters to keep us cool, which was not the case when we arrived. Our waiter, Lukas, seemed friendly at first but did not attend to us majority of the time. Due to the intense heat we ran out of water quickly and he did not bother to refill our glasses or even check in on us at all. We waited about 30 minutes before we had to ask a different waiter for water, to which they took another 20 minutes to bring. Meanwhile, Lukas was attentive to all his other tables and we frequently saw him delivering glasses of water to them while blatantly ignoring us. The heat was causing some of us to feel faint and nauseous and no one was even concerned at how miserable we seemed. In our opinion, leaving us in such heat without any water was dangerous; heat exhaustion is not uncommon in this type of weather. We were not rude or obnoxious so we feel we had no reason to be neglected in such an obvious manner. We considered leaving as we knew we would be there for quite some more time and the food had yet to come. We waited about 45 minutes more for the food after our appetizer and had to sit there even longer as we had dessert on the way (which we didn’t even want anymore at that point). The dessert came half melted and we grew so frustrated that my cousin herself had to get up to ask for the check, since we knew it was unlikely he would be back with it anytime soon. Only when we were leaving did Lukas make an attempt to talk with us, however, when he did he asked us odd questions about our age and why we weren’t drinking alcohol which seemed invasive to us. Despite the terrible service, we still tipped him an undeserving 18% to which he told us to visit him again soon;...