Bettola — Restaurant in Birmingham

My wife and I came here for dinner and I really had high hopes. I wanted to like this place based off of so many great reviews... First off, the positives: making a reservation, the host and the quality of the food was all fantastic. We walked right in, gave our name and had a table in minutes. The quality of the food was great but I am basing that off of a small example because the portion was laughably small. We ordered drinks and they were fine, mine was very weak but a good mix of flavor (The Fox drink). Our server was hands down one of the worst I have ever seen. He took about 10-15 minutes to get to our table where he gave us room temp water and took our drink order. The minute we said we did not want an appetizer he gave up on us. He brought "some bread for the table" which he simple said he would do and never told us or implied that it actually cost money. He implied that it was a given and took advantage of the upsell and us not knowing. We did not see him again for about 30 minutes at which point we figured if everything will take this long we may as well get an appetizer (calamari) since we were hungry. They were out of it so we just went ahead and ordered entrées. Once our food arrived via a food runner we saw our server once to ask if I wanted another drink and then he never reappeared. In an almost 2 hour period we saw this guy a total of 3 times.... He was so focused on up-selling everything that he had no care for us or providing decent service. I got the Lombatello steak ($28). which consisted of a decent sized steak, cooked just right, and a small arugula salad and that was it. We had to wait another 10 minutes for him to try and sell us a dessert and once we declined that we watched him spend 15 minutes handling individual checks for a part of 8 and even sitting down next to them to talk while we waited for our check. Had he even dropped off our check first and then dealt with that they would have freed up a table and we could have left 25 minutes earlier... All in all we paid $92 for a small meal, two ok drinks and absolutely terrible service. I've been to too many great places in Birmingham at easily $30 less per check and had far better experiences to ever...

We went to lunch at 11:40 and were told there was an hour wait, so I left my phone number and never got a call. Finally at 1:20, we decided to walk back over where one host had no clue who we were. We were seated once another host had miraculously found my name on the list. We sat down and proceeded to wait about 20 minutes to be greeted by our waiter then an additional 10 minutes for some water. We put in our drink orders and an order of burratta. Fast forward 30 minutes and our server tells us the restaurant had run out of bread and pizza (during our extremely long wait 3 out of the 4 of us had decided on pizza, also still no drinks) which is conveniently 2 of the only three things that are served here during lunch. We opted to get the $40 charcuterie which is a hodgepodge of pickles, meat, cheese and sauces which was extremely lackluster. Once the meals came out, cold sandwiches and mediocre soup all wrapped up with a $50 bill per person. This restaurant is in a great area and has the appearance of being a great restaurant in Birmingham but from this first, and likely last, experience I will not be returning and will be letting everyone I know that there is much better Birmingham has to offer. These would be comments for the manager but he failed to speak to our table a single time, so we did not have the opportunity to voice our...

I'm from out of town and when I asked for recommendations for dinner, everyone pointed me to Bettola.

I will never ask for their recommendations again.

The service was incredibly slow this evening. We thought we were forgotten about and had to get up to ask if we had a server. We ordered a burrata, gnocchi, and some other items.

I don't know if Bettola's burrata can actually be called burrata. I've never had it so runny---it wasn't even creamy, and would separate itself from the olive oil you've doused on top. Cheese dip, maybe?

Other dishes were good.

We had to physically wave to the staff on more than one occasion after waiting patiently with empty water and wine glasses.

After asking for the check, it took the server another 7 minutes to recall what I ordered, write it out on a piece of paper, then calculate the total. I gave him the card and had to wait another 5+ minutes for him to manually write down all of my credit card information, without consent.

His excuse why everything took so long this evening was because their computers were down--which still doesn't explain why food and service took such a long time in a near vacant restaurant. It would also have been nice if he was courteous enough to introduce himself and made us aware of the problem when he first...