Candicci's Catering & Express — Restaurant in Ballwin

To start, the bread is not restaurant quality at all. 3-day-old dinner rolls from the Walmart bakery are 10x better. The oil-based dipping concoction looks and tastes gross and odd. There was a fly buzzing around that landed on my bread at one point. I got the apricot charbroiled chicken. It was one the “cheaper” options, and I’ve gotten similar dishes elsewhere that have been so good I’ve replicated them at home. But this was disgusting. The apricot sauce was more like syrup. Maybe what you’d expect from McDonald’s if they did an apricot sauce. The broccoli side was unsightly and disintegrating. The chicken itself was horrible as well and looked anemic. How is this not embarrassing for them? I took 3 bites and was done.

The waiter had been pretty nice but he definitely noticed I wasn’t eating my food. If this had been a decent restaurant, he would have been like a normal waiter and asked me if it was ok. Of course he didn’t, because he knows the quality sucks. He brought me a to-go box without asking and couldn’t even look me in the eye at that point. Just very pathetic for a restaurant to be so bad that the staff won’t even give you the chance to express negative feedback. And I’m unfortunately not the type to complain, but if he had asked, I would have been honest.

I’m mad I wasted money here, with how expensive food is nowadays with inflation. Wish I were a more assertive person, I would have made it clear how this wasn’t worth even $2...

Food and service were both below expectations. The decor was fine, but the place looked messy. Our waiter was trying hard to take care of us, but seemed like he was trying to cover too many tables and took too long each time he stopped at his tables. He took our drink and app order, brought the drinks and bread then took several minutes to talk to other tables before coming back to take our order. Our app came out while he was taking our order, brought out by the owner, but the whole process took so long to get this far the toasted ravioli was already getting cold. Salads came out we opted for the Candicci which has salami and olives added, it was a little heavy but tasted pretty good. The entrées arrived before we were half way through the salad. I ordered the pasta salsicca; sausage and pasta in red sauce; the pasta was over cooked and falling apart, the sausage was burnt when they were toasting the cheese on the dish and the sauce was very sweet. My wife had the chicken cordon Bob, and had very little good or bad to say about it. Our friend had the Lemonada, it was too lemony to eat, she ended up eating the chicken off the top and leaving the rest. We won't be back anytime soon but may try it again if we don't find a better Italian place...

Sadly I was disappointed with my first visit here on 12/22/18. Brian was our waiter and he was nice but not very attentive at all. Being a server myself I would have expected the place would be packed by the service we were receiving . Simple stuff like no refills unless we asked and the table never being cleared of dirty dishes are things I can deal with.

The main things that upset me are as follows....

1. the food took forever (which is not the problem) but EVERYTHING at a party of seven was ice cold! The chicken modigas had a slice of cheese slapped on top that wasn’t even melted The food was all terrible and sent back.

2. The manager on duty Chris didn’t even come out and address the situation. He removed stuff from the bill, which is fine because we didn’t eat it. He just made Brian deal with the situation himself. As a server he clearly isn’t in charge of cooking too so why wouldn’t management even come out and back up his server???? We asked to speak to him 3 times! Says ALOT about this place!

On the plus side because I’m in the industry and I totally understand every place has bad night! The spinach artichoke dip is everything!!! Yum yum yum there. Sadly I wish the rest of the meal...