The Villa — Restaurant in California

I am always willing to try out a new restaurant, so we drove up to Twain Harte to try out “The Villa, Wine and Dine”. It is located where Villa de Oro was before they closed. Since the owner of Viney’s Italian restaurant opened “The Villa'', we had high expectations for his new venture.

Sadly, we were extremely disappointed. We arrived around 2:30 in the afternoon. My first letdown was the booths (with the curtains) were removed. Not so important, but I was looking forward to sitting in one. Kudos though, the restaurant remodel did look nice and was clean.

We ordered our favorite wines and perused the paper menu. It was filled with lots of appetizers, some salads, and a few sandwiches/burgers. I was anticipating a nice Italian lunch based on it being a project of Viney's. I had an epiphany and asked our server if maybe there was a dinner menu. [He] brought one over to us to look at, but stated no of those menu items are not available until after 4:00. Note, there were a total of four dinner items. At this point we should have left. But we decided to give it a go ...so, we ordered from the paper menu.

A chicken sandwich with fries, and a turkey burger with a salad was our order. Quite different from the pasta I was hoping for. The chicken sandwich was a thin piece of breast meat on a small burger type bun, a piece of lettuce, some onions, and pickles. About twenty undercooked french fries were served on the side. The chicken was dry.

The turkey burger patty (not even a ¼ lb.) was undercooked, yet overly charred and soooo dry. It came with a half piece of (I think) mozzarella cheese and was not even melted (was I expecting too much?), a piece of iceberg lettuce, some onions, and pickles. Hey! My side salad was wonderful.

Our server was just okay. The water glasses were kept full. He never once asked us how we liked the food, nor did he say thank you when we were leaving. I wanted an opportunity to tell him about our experience.

The total bill was $54.00. For this price, one would expect the food to be more than mediocre. We dine at quite a few local restaurants and up until now, we only had one restaurant that we took off our list (they know who they are). We...

I have been to The Villa about eight times. The first three were very good. The next two were not great. The last three were awful.

The last three times we went there, the food was not good and the service was awful.

We were so excited when The Villa first opened and thought we found our new place in Twain Harte when the food, service, price, and atmosphere were all good.

Something happened in the last six to eight months and after the last three visits we will not go back.

The food is cheap, flavorless, and poorly prepared.

The service is even worse.

I was surprised when server came to our table wearing a hoodie with a ball cap. I first thought he was another customer. After he took our order, he forgot the drinks, forgot the bread, got the order wrong, and failed to check on us.

We had to go to the bar to ask for the drinks we ordered. We had to go to the host (who was the only service-oriented person working) to ask for our bread.

The one time we were able to get the servers attention to ask for something he got wrong, he was dismissive and rude.

Tonight when we were deciding where to go out to eat, we decided to give The Villa one more try. Tonight's experience was the third strike. We really wanted to support this restaurant but after the third awful...

We were so excited to try this new place in town. It was clean, the staff were nice, and they had many items on the menu, maybe too many. We ordered the appetizer brie and fig jam with toast. It was an extremely tiny portion and the brie was fine, toast was flavorless, and cut apples were plain. Our biggest mistake was ordering a fried chicken sandwich. It was kids dried, fried chicken tenders placed on a sandwich. Any fast food chicken sandwich would far surpass the flavor and quality, plus it was around $20. Fries were jumbo and over salted and the ketchup tasted like tomato sugar. They should just invest in Heinz. The Margarita flatbread was probably the best thing we had. They used pizza dough so it was more of a doughy Margarita pizza than a thin flatbread. It was fairly pricy for the food quality. They need to focus on doing less menu items with higher quality ingredients. They would also benefit from a more inviting outdoor atmosphere- maybe some music to entice people in. I’m sad to say we will not...