Scarpetta's — Restaurant in Fremont

UPDATE: One year later.

Many things have been fixed, some remain

Improvement: Wine list now reads correctly. Salt and pepper shakers on tables Pasta was well drained Salad was beautiful and very good

Still lacking: SALT - nothing had enough salt, not the pasta, not the sauce, not the shortrib

The oil served with the bread was still a pomace or blend oil, definitely not EVOO No pizzeria items

The menu calls out fresh pasta several times. Upon asking the server, all their pasta is dry.

The stuffed banana peppers were just...wrong. Normally, these are filled with cheese, Italian sausage and baked until the peppers are cooked and served on a bed of sauce. These were served barely warmed, filled with cream cheese with various ground meat in them, with the appearance of cat vomit.

In summary, it is better and worth the trip but still turning in "C+" work when it has the potential for "A+"

Original Review: The restaurant is beautifully decorated and has great potential, but it seems to drop the ball on the one yard line.

I was there during happy hour. I ordered the asparagus salad small plate. The asparagus had not been trimmed and was inedible at the base. The dressing was tasteless. Proper trimming and a sprinkle of sea salt, or better yet, a rosemary infused salt would have made the difference. For the record, there was no salt or pepper at the table, nor was it offered.

The soups on offer that day were French onion, cream of tomato, or chili - not exactly Italian options; I opted for the French onion.

The French onion was the high point of the meal. The base was beefy with a good onion flavor. The onions were caramalized but not broken down completely. The traditional croutons were not overpowering, and the provolone cheese made a nice topper. It was well melted but had obviously been torched, making the cheese more black than browned.

The bread had the potential to be great! Connected to the restaurant is a take out only pizzeria. The bread was quite sweet and lacked flavor. The herbed olive oil was either a blend or pomace oil as it, too, had no flavor. A few grinds of salt would go a long way again.

For my main, I ordered what was billed on the menu as fresh spaghetti, and I added a link of sausage. The spaghetti was thin spaghetti but was certainly dried pasta. The sauce tasted of nearly nothing, just a slight hint of flavor from the fresh basil garnish found its way through the tasteless tomato sauce. The pasta had not been adequately drained and made a wet mess in the bowl. The sausage link was cut in two pieces and boiled. It had not been browned at all and was a slimy cylinder in the dish.

I ordered a glass of house wine. However, the menu was misprinted, and the wines annotated as house wines by stars weren't correct. I asked for a house wine list, and the server told me to just ask her if it was.

As noted before in the room, next door is a takeout only pizzaria and Italian food shop; I was shocked to see not a single pizza, flatbread, or other item on the restaurant menu.

I ate almost nothing as it wasn't worth wasting the calories.

I might try the pizzeria one day, but I'll have to do it on a day when I plan to eat my...

Went there for dinner (10/03/2023) Won't be going back. One of the worst experiences I have had in a restaurant in a long time. We ordered the bruschetta for an appetizer. It didn't come until after we had gotten and eaten our salads AND our main dishes. We told the waitress to cancel it, so she took it off of our bill, but they made it anyway. Then it just sat and went to waste because we had eaten our whole meals by then. Silly that you can't get appetizers to come out to the customer in the proper timeframe. It was well over an hour by the time it came to our table from the time that we ordered it.

Apparently, they were having problems with their drink dispenser system. When the waitress brought my diet soda, she told me to taste it first because of the problems they were having. It definitely wasn't diet soda. She brought me a canned diet coke instead. But instead of bringing me a new glass, she strained the bad soda through the ice, and gave me back the same glass. Weird. Then later, when I needed a refill, she just brought me another glass from the dispenser system that tasted the same as the original one she had me test first. My wife ordered a cup of after dinner coffee. We waited thirty minutes, and it never came.

She had the soup and salad and was happy with her food. I had the pasta carbonara and caesar salad. The menu stated that the carbonara had "crispy bits of bacon", but the bacon bits were few and far between, and they were soggy and chewy. The asiago sauce was mostly oil, with minimal flavor. The amount of food that I got was comical, as it barely covered the bottom of the bowl that it was served in.

There were a lot of staff between there and the deli next door. Most of them engaging in conversations with each other as opposed to helping customers. None of them were smiling. The waitress would talk to you while she was walking away from you. The decorative light along the wall at our booth was flashing incessantly the whole time we were there. The salt and pepper shakers on the table were empty. When I asked the waitress, she brought a large pepper grinder and gave me pepper, but not salt.

Typical establishment of the owner. Make things nice, but don't follow through on delivering a quality product. Easy to do in a town with limited options. Do yourself a favor and drive somewhere else if you...

Typical Fremont-good idea, poor implementation.

Hadn't been here, but had heard nothing but good from lots of friends. The wife and I had a gift card, and decided to go there on a Monday because it was the only supposedly decent place nearby open on Monday.

For a Monday, it was surprisingly busy. We waited at the front counter for a long time before anyone came and addressed us. We were seated on the south side wall-this side of the restaurant was now completely filled with patrons, as ours was the last available booth. We quickly realized that there was only one waitress for the whole restaurant, as it took a long time before she came to even greet us. This subpar level of service continued throughout the visit. We were in the restaurant for over 2 hours because of how slow the service was. Although the waitress was friendly, she spoke with poor grammar and used slang terminology-definitely not the level of professionalism I would expect from a restaurant that is this pricey.

For the food, we ordered a couple's special which included an appetizer, dessert, and bottle of wine, along with an entree for each of us. I chose the chicken parmagiana, thinking that it is a simple classic and that they couldn't make a bad dish of it. The chicken was pounded too thin, then subsequently overcooked, leaving me with a dry and rubbery piece of chicken parmagiana. The sauce was very dark, thick, and tasted as if it had been simmering too long. Not even close in quality to the chicken parmagiana at Sortino's in Sandusky, which is much cheaper. The balance of our dishes were mediocre at best.

Two other items that really added up to a poor lackluster experience were that none of our dirty dishes were removed from our table the whole visit. The waitress even asked me to push our dirty salad dishes aside so that she could place our entrees on the table. Finally, the napkins. When I place a linen napkin on my mouth to wipe it, I expect it to either not smell, or smell pleasant. The napkins were of dark color, so they were unable to be bleached, and it was obvious. My napkin smelled so badly that I asked for another-which didn't smell any better.

I think a fine Italian restaurant could be a really nice addition to Fremont, but as implemented, Scarpetta's is definitely not worth the...