Angelo's Italy — Restaurant in Bandon

Starting with the good - We went there to see our friend's daughter's dance group perform and they were spectacular. Creative and beautiful. That was worth coming home and eating leftovers from yesterday since the food at Angelo's was so flavorless. And the waitresses were very nice.

Overall, It kinda just feels like they are going through the motions with no passion. I have to ask if the cooks actually taste the food.

When we first arrived I used the restroom to wash my hands and noticed that the toilet seat was broken (should have told my wife who found out the hard way at the end of the meal), the porcelain bowl cracked and the garbage can full to the top with paper towels at the beginning of service. These are all cheap fixes and it just takes a little attention to empty the garbage.

I checked their online menu from a few years ago and it looked like a good place to eat then and our friends who ate there a couple of years ago gave it good reviews. The current menu is a shadow of its former self. Now it's mostly $22-$35 pasta plates and pizzas with very little in the way of proteins. And if you order the $30+ scallops and pasta plate as one of our friends did, you get watery sauce and a handful of rubbery bay scallops. Most people expect well cooked sea scallops at that price.

I've eaten Italian food from restaurants that you need to go to on someone else's expense account to holes in the wall on Arthur Ave. in the Bronx to Olive Garden (OK, I'm not proud of that one) and they were all much better than this. I had the cheese ravioli with a watery alfredo sauce reminiscent of watered down Bertoli sauce but less flavorful. And, the ravioli were flavorless. If I had been blindfolded it would have been hard to tell you what I was eating.

Given the robust menu and good reviews from friends from a few years ago, this experience...

A bit of mixed feelings about this place…

We had dinner at their charming outdoor patio and thought we came prepared for the changing weather, but our sweaters were no match for the cold breeze (of course not blaming it on the restaurant, just mentioning in case you also can’t or don’t want to dine indoors). The service was great, there was even live music (the poor musician must have frozen his fingertips off playing the guitar), but we couldn’t quite agree on the food, which my better half liked but I found too bland.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was until the main course, when I realized that none of the dishes had any garlic in them. Now, we’ve been to places that used garlic so liberally that it’s aftertaste & smell would haunt us until the next day—we’re certainly not fans. But here the needle was pegged in the other direction. Surprisingly, lack of garlic didn’t hurt the bruschetta, a dish traditionally defined by it, thanks to a well balanced use of olive oil & balsamic glaze and quite an elegant & unusual presentation. But the chicken parmigiana & particularly the side of penne arrabbiata were just school-cafeteria-bland. Even the tiramisu was rather plain (and no, I’m not saying it should have contained garlic). My wife enjoyed her mushroom ravioli, though, probably because that’s the one item that truly benefited from conservative seasoning.

I’m no GoodFella (remember the scene in prison, where Paulie used a razor to slice garlic “so thin that it would liquefy in the pan”?) and can’t bring myself to take off two stars for this surprising at an Italian place lack of seasoning—a star-and-a-half off would be more fair, if allowed. In the end we had a great time; late (for Bandon standards) last seating probably deserves a...

Edit to respond to the owner: I appreciate where you are coming from but you are misremembering us. We didn't leave a purse nor were offered any sort of food compensation. Hope that you are running better and that more care is taken into the food.

The food is pretty spendy for very small portions. We ordered a salad ($15 for small salad), caprese salad ($14), a cheese board ($14 for three pieces of baguette, a dipping tray that is way more than what you could ever do with said bread, tiny caprese salad, and Parm cut into large chunks), and a pizza ($22). Not only did the pizza take an hour to cook, it was the most disgusting, dry, flour crusted cracker of a pizza I'd ever seen. A few toppings, very little cheese or sauce with a dry crust coated in flour which leaves you with a dry mouth. Our poor waitress was working the floor with her daughter and another very young man. The kids were lost, they had to count tables to remember who ordered what, and mom/waitress spent her time apologizing for how long waits were. She told us twice that our pizza would be out soon, told us the third time that she wanted to remind us pizzas take longer (we never asked nor were told) and their oven was preheating as we are at least 25 min into waiting, and the fourth time she said it was almost done then presenting the most disgusting pizza I'd ever seen. Everyone was clearly overwhelmed and they should really close for a few days and train their staff. A total waste of...