Cafe Notte | Italian Restaurant & Bar — Restaurant in Emsworth

Great food and friendly servers... but very poor ownership/management.

If not for the decent food and extremely friendly servers, we would never return to Café Notte. After several times of dining at Café Notte, we learned that it is owned by a husband and wife duo. The owners are also the managers from what I can tell. There are several aspects that make the ownership just awful. Both my husband and I are working professionals, so we know what to expect from other professionals. Additionally, I worked in a nice restaurant for four years while in college, so I understand how managers/owners should conduct themselves properly. The first thing you will notice is that they are ALWAYS drinking. They take up one of their tables and drink their own inventory. And I’m not talking water and pop…. They always have wine, beer or cocktails in hand. I find it so unprofessional to be blatantly drinking in front of your guests that you are supposed to be serving. And this drinking is constant – almost every time we go…. It’s also not at the end of the evening at the bar. It’s at 5:00, 6:00 – all night at a main dining table, inside or out! (I want to note that it is just the owners, the husband and wife, that do the drinking… not the servers and so on). Moving on from the drinking… the husband seems nice enough. He has said hello to us a few times. We often see him “do his rounds” and greet guests, asking how their food is. This is a great thing to do – it shows the guests that more than just their server wants them to have an enjoyable dining experience. One rather funny aspect (at least I find it humorous), is that the husband seems to avoid checking in on younger couples! I can’t figure out why this is – maybe he doesn’t think they will spend a lot of money or not tip well? Who knows. This is something the wife does not do. I can’t say that she never does it – I have just never seen her check in on a table while we were there dining. While we are on the husband (and again, he seems like a very nice man), there is another occurrence that just seems strange to us. I am not sure what line of work he is in besides his Café Notte business, but he appears to have a few employees from another line of business that go to Café Notte after their “9 to 5” job. They appear to be in construction, as they are rather dirty and certainly not dressed for a nicer dining experience. These guys are loud, the owner is buying them drinks, and worst of all… they smoke on the patio (or just a foot off of the patio) where guests are eating!! Don’t get me wrong – if you want to smoke, fine, but do it away from where people are eating their food! Also, show some respect and go home, take a shower, and change before going to a restaurant. They shouldn’t even go to an Eat-n’-Park dressed the way they are. Moving on from the husband to the wife. I cannot tell you how many times (and this is what bothers me the most) is that while the hostess is gathering menus to seat us, the wife will come over… not say hello to us or greet us… and ask if we made reservations (note that we do not and we have never been there and not been sat immediately – they are never full). So the wife comes to ask us/the hostess if we made reservations all the while we are already being sat. She will actually make faces when we say no, we did not make reservations – that we drove by and saw all the open tables! The OWNER rolls her eyes at guests!! And remember, she is sitting at a table herself drinking wine… so no… clearly Café Notte is not that busy and requires reservations. I even asked the hostess once if they normally get a lot of reservations. Her response was, no – only on holidays. Yeesh – some people! I hate the idea of putting money in this couples hands but supporting their business, but Café Notte is close, the food is good, and the servers are great. So we think of it as helping out the servers for having to deal with the awful owners they work for and...

a lot of small things came together not so well to kind of leave our group frustrated- we were repeatedly given a heads up that an enormous group of 70 was slated to sit an hour after us. Most of us have been in food service and all too well know the storm that was coming, so we wanted to make it as smooth as we could for the staff. The several times this was reiterated we obliged and saw no issue being a little swift; what complicated this was the quality of the food was absolutely not a representation of the reviews given previously. Instead of the beautiful round stone fired pizzas we saw around us, our group was given lunch lady style oblong pizza that was also completely room temperature. When it was communicated the pizza had obviously sat for quite some time, the only offer was to reheat it.

The pasta dishes were absent any real flavor, leaving us to dump Parmesan and lemon on them to revive them. The advertised sauce meant to accompany the chicken Romano of white wine, butter, and lemon was absent and in its stead a salty brown oil with no flavor or mention of the white wine or lemon. The garnish of zucchini was actually good, a bright spot in all of it albeit a very minor player given the scarcity.

It was my wife’s birthday celebration, and not wanting to put dark marks on her day we basically kept going. Then, while she was opening gifts- literally arm in a bag and thanking her grandparents- the cake is presented candles lit and shoved in front of her. I get this was likely an effort to be helpful; by itself would have been understandable. Had they bothered to look up and recognize the terrible timing rather than proceed with pushing us along they may have noticed a good number of our party missing from the table and now missing the awkward happy birthday. Add it in with all around being rushed along at each stage I can’t help but feel like the objective was to push us out to accommodate the clearly oversized and daunting party of 70 in the actual banquet/party rooms. So oversized it apparently was necessary for a party of 14 to be seated three feet from the mens restroom and clearly in the way of kitchen staff moving full sheet pans of product from one area to another over the heads of guests due to restricted access and us being so close to active entryways.

Everyone has bad days. This seems to have been a bad day for quite a few kitchen and wait staff that came together in perfectly coordinated fashion. A perfectly coordinated fashion that was endured so as to not make a scene during someone else’s celebration that had no place costing $150 for two adults and two young toddlers.

Everyone has bad days. Unfortunately this bad day cost our group several hundred dollars and a wasted opportunity that would have been better spent at the places we’ve come to trust rather than branch out and explore like we did here. I’d rather have been told our group couldn’t be accommodated than waste an evening watching my crestfallen family convince themselves time and again that...

We went here on Valentine’s Day last week and since then we have not been able to stop thinking about how much we wish we hadn’t gone here. I made an online reservation and when we showed up, the lot was empty enough to not have to use valet. Walking into the front it was nice right off the bat. Got seated relatively quickly as well and was able to pick where we sat which was nice as well. When we sat, I was shocked to see a fixed menu, which was not disclosed anywhere. My fiancée hadn’t looked at the menu prior to our visit but I had and was expecting the dishes I thought she’d love to be on the menu. Immediately disappointed right off the bat. I was also very surprised to see not very much range in the pricing of the entrees. Three of them were 60+ and the other two were under 50. I ordered a drink and it came very quickly and was also delicious. I ordered the Vera or something close to that name. We decided to order one soup and one salad to share since we couldn’t decide on an app. We placed our food order and got our soup and salad relatively quickly as well. The soup was smaller than I would’ve liked it to be for the price and the same goes with the salad. From the limited menu I got the sea bass and my fiancée ordered the seafood Alfredo. My entree was cooked and seasoned very well and I enjoyed it. My fiancées seemed a little clunky. The pasta was handmade and I thought it was super thick and undercooked/doughy. Taste overall was nice but for an almost $50 pasta dish I expected way better. All in all we spent $200 tip included and looking back since then we could’ve gone almost anywhere in the city and spent less and had better. We don’t go out very often but we have been able to dine at some really nice places downtown and we would have rather gone somewhere else and...