Quattro Gatti Ristorante e Pizzeria — Restaurant in Austin

I wanted to like this place — the restaurant is in a great location — but the experience was disappointing overall, both in food and service.

Food: I ordered the watermelon salad, which was clearly not fresh. The watermelon tasted like it had been cut too long ago and had absorbed other food flavors. It reminded me of when you mix too many colors together — instead of something bright and fresh, you get a dull, dirty tone. That’s exactly how the watermelon tasted: watery and muddled, not clean or crisp. The salad itself was just chunks of watermelon tossed with spring greens, uneven pieces of cheese, and what seemed like store-bought dressing — carelessly made. The pizza wasn’t much better. The oven worked fine, but the dough felt poorly stored and handled, lacking any real texture or flavor.

Service: When I asked about the daily specials written on the blackboard, the server (an Asian man) read the entire list aloud instead of explaining briefly. I stopped him when he mentioned the watermelon salad — not wanting to embarrass him — but he misunderstood and removed it from my bill without asking. At first, I thought it was just confusion, but looking back, it felt quite insulting. I’m half-deaf, so I couldn’t hear everything clearly, but I could sense he wasn’t paying much attention to me. What made it worse was noticing how much more attentive he was toward other (non-Asian) guests. That sense of bias was disappointing, especially coming from someone of the same background.

To the Owner: I’m a former food business owner myself, and my family still operates a franchise group with over 170 employees back home. From one professional to another — what are you doing? You have a great location and solid potential, but poor food handling and careless service will ruin your reputation faster than...

Come on. "Traditional Italian food." Really?

Pros: The Foccacia bread that we ordered was decent. Mussels were cooked well. Servers we had were very nice to us and told us what was good in terms of Pasta.

Cons: The Beef Carappacio was too thick to be called a carappacio. Over seasoned on top of that. The sauce that the mussels were served in were too tangy. Way too tangy. For our entrees, they were all out of pizza dough. I had heard the pizza here was supposedly really good, so I naturally came here with the intention of eating some Napolitano-style pizza. I was a bit disappointed, and so was my family but we came near closing time, so I can't really complain about that. The pasta dishes that we had here were horrendous. All of the pasta across all of our dishes was dry and just not seasoned. The meatballs that were on top of one of our pasta dishes tasted like lunch meat, while the other meatballs on other dishes tasted fine. Specifically 2 on one of the dishes tasted very bad. It's like they had a set of meatballs in the fridge that they needed to finish up. The chicken parmesan was dry. There was also a hair that was tucked neatly on the side of my plate of pasta. Did they just not take it out after finding it? Finally, we got a Tiramisu. Now, I have never tasted a Tiramisu this bad. It tasted as if there was a raspberry in every single bite of cake. I am 100% sure that We ordered the Tiramisu. After all of this we needed to wash our hands and the bathroom door didn't lock. I don't know what more to say about this.

Overall, a big disappointment. This was definitely not "one of the best Italian...

The food was great and the atmosphere was really cool. The only reason for 1 star was the service, it was terrible. Our waitress made us feel like we were an inconvenience to her the entire night. After ordering, she never came back to check on us, she never refilled our water glasses and we had to continuously refill our own wine glasses. Even after our food was served, she was nowhere to be found and never checked in to see how everything turned out. Quite possibly the worst part of the evening came near the end. After our waitress cleared our plates, we passed on dessert as we still had half a bottle of wine to drink...so our dessert was going to be our wine as we sat and enjoyed our conversation. Only to feel rushed, our server promptly showed up with our check and said thanks for coming in? It was only 8:00pm and I looked around only to see multiple open tables, so I couldn’t understand what the rush was. This of course added to feeling that we were a huge inconvenience to her. But it didn’t stop us from drinking the rest of our expensive wine, even though our waitress decided it was now time to be attentive and asked multiple times if she could take our check...which we told her we haven’t even looked at it since we were still enjoying our wine. To say the service was something to be desired is a huge understatement. This could have been a great evening but the server didn’t seem to grasp the idea of...