Green Arch Restaurant — Restaurant in City of Cortland

I really, really wanted to like this place.

It was very promising at first. The atmosphere is everything you want in an old school Italian joint down to the authentic vintage booths, trimmed up service areas, and linoleum tiling and a dim wood paneled, slightly neon feel. I fell in love with the ambiance the moment I was seated. It's all perfect in its feel.

The service was also good. No complaints about how anybody treated us. We were seated immediately and well attended to.

The appetizer was great. The fried calimari was quite good!

What went wrong? Why two stars?

The entree.

I ordered a simple chicken parm, as I usually do at unfamiliar Italian places. It's a dish everyone serves so it's a good baseline to judge everything else off of. If they can do a good chicken parm I'll feel safe coming back to try other things. My wife ordered a chicken eggplant combo dish. After everything else was so great I had high hopes.

And again, as it came out I was happy. It was well presented, and the portions were more than fair! Everything was fantastic... until I ate some!

Without hyperbole, it was the worst chicken parm I've ever been served at any restaurant. It broke my heart. I went back and tried bite after bite, trying to convince myself that I was somehow mistaken but every time I did it just got worse. The sauce was overly sweet and didn't have flavor; if that were the only thing I could get past it, but the chicken itself tasted like one of those pre-formed nugget patties you get on a Burger King sandwich. I'm not sure that it was in fact pre-formed, but it sure tasted like it. Combined with the lackluster sauce and soggy breading, I was very unhappy with the meal.

Worse yet, my wife's chicken was tough. Tough in a way that I've never experienced at a restaurant. Like, it took effort to chew. Tough like a stale bagel. She had me try a bite to make sure she wasn't imagining it. It was terrible. The eggplant was okay according to her, but with the majority of our entree being bad I was feeling pretty dejected about the whole experience.

I want to go back and give them another chance for all their other merits, maybe these issues are isolated to chicken dishes or they just had a very off night... but honestly my meal was so bad that I'm not sure I can.

I'm sorry Green Arch. Two stars is the best I can do. I really, really hope this was a...

I really wanted to like this place - I'd heard and read great things about it. Unfortunately, the experience started bad and only got worse.

We sat at the bar prior to our reservation and it was nearly 10 minutes before the bartender even acknowledged us, let alone got us drinks. After we were seated at our table, it took a long time for our server to come over and even longer for waters to be brought, food to be delivered, dirty plates to be cleared, etc. We were there for almost 2 hours due to the length of time we were waiting for items.

The food was mediocre at best. Both of our salads were full of slimy inedible lettuce, the bread was gummy, and the calamari was incredibly salty (not to mention served on a plank nearly as long as the table).

Entrees fared no better. The lasagna was underseasoned and the sauce was too sweet. It was also just barely warm. My partner's chicken/mushroom/meatball/pasta combo was not hot and had inedible chunks of food - we sent it back. The replacement sausage & meatballs he ordered instead were also not hot and were slathered in the too-sweet Arch sauce. Needless to say, we passed on dessert.

When the check came, there were 3 drinks we did not order on the bill. The server was kind but seemed distracted and unable to pay attention to her tables fully. My partner and I were both incredibly disappointed by the experience and will likely not...

What a disappointment. We couldn’t wait to celebrate my husband’s birthday with a great Italian meal. The first disappointment was the selection of pastas. Rigatoni, ziti and angel hair. We had planned to order the pasta al vongole (with clams and clam sauce) which is traditionally served with spaghetti or linguine. Okay. We changed our thinking to one of the dishes that works well with ziti. When we tried to order the pasta cooked “al dente”, our waitress told us “we don’t do al dente?” Excuse me? How can an award winning Italian restaurant not “do” al dente. When we questioned that, our waitress curtly responded with a shrug, “not my rules”. So we had to rethink our entire order. No pasta. Okay. There was a 10 oz. Angus filet mignon special, enough for us to share. At $ 48.00, imagine our shock when we were told there is a “share plate” charge. Fortunately, the steak was superb, cooked perfectly at medium as we requested. Amazingly, the green beans WERE cooked al dente, so the concept is not completely foreign at The Green Arch. If we had been hoping for a great steak meal, I would have rated it a 5. However, when you want pasta, nothing else really works. By the way, be sure to take a pair of surgical gloves or hand sanitizer. The grease covering the outside door and every surface in the bathroom has been accumulating there since the Green Arch...