Mamma Rita's Pizzeria & Italian Grill — Restaurant in Groveland

Terrible experience at Mama Rita’s on Friday 08/25/23. We arrived & were promptly showed to our seats, it wasn’t very crowded. We’d eaten there before & had mediocre service but wanted to give the benefit of the doubt that our previous experience was a one-off incident. We ordered our drinks & began to place our food order. First disappointment was that, even though the menu states entrees come with soup or salad and bread, the server told us no, they no longer offer salad or soup with the meals. Only bread. (However, the price point was, of course, not discounted in any way… why should we be surprised.) Ok, so if we want a salad it’s just another way for them to get more money out of us, so we sucked it up & ordered a salad to share, it was, after all, Date Night. My husband ordered spaghetti & meat sauce, and I ordered tortellini Sofia Loren. Both are pretty straight forward meals…The bread was brought to us by a different server, who was actually talking on her earpiece while delivering the bread. She sort of plopped the basket in the middle of the table & as she was talking, we thought she was taking to us, so asked her ‘excuse me?’ She gave us an annoyed look, I guess she didn’t want her conversation interrupted while she was serving tables… excuse us for paying for your salary…. Well we get the salad, a caprese salad - not much that can be done wrong with a caprese, though we must say that their tomato suppliers need to do better, the tomatoes were hard & lacked any real flavor. The worst part was still to come. My husbands meal came out & the server said my meal would be ‘a few more minutes.’ Ok, sometimes meals get warmed at different timeframes, a few minutes isn’t bad. My husband asked for a diet Pepsi refill & the server brought back a regular Pepsi. He is diabetic, and yes, he ordered pasta, but he still asked for a diet drink…but after she dropped off the soda, she disappeared. And disappeared. And disappeared The other server passed & we finally got her attention for the soda issue & she brought the right soda & was going to check on my meal. I told my husband to go ahead & eat because his meal was getting cold by this point. Tables around us, who sat after us, were served.But our server, when serving other tables, always seemed to keep her back to us. Finally, I caught her eye & said, it’s been over 25 minutes. My husband is almost done his meal & I still don’t have a meal. She went to check. Again. Came back a few minutes later & said ‘your meal is in the oven. There was a mixup’ ITS STILL JUST IN THE OVEN?! I told her I wasn’t going to wait & eat it there. My husband was already finishing his meal, so pack mine to go. She scurried away. I asked the other server, the one who liked to talk in her earpiece (a phone call? Plotting excuses with the kitchen? who knows …) anyway, I asked for the manager. She didn’t seem to understand. I didn’t get a manager. I got my meal delivered in a bag, drinks to go, a hurried apology and, of course, a bill for the whole amount. Not even a discount. The manager never came out. Does the manager even know that their store can’t seem to serve 2 basic meals at the same time? Maybe the manager knows & just doesn’t care, it’s hard to tell…Because we never saw a manager. I know it’s not the servers fault for the kitchen’s incapability to fulfill an order for a 2-top table, but the server SHOULD know well enough that when 30 minutes passes between ‘your meal will be a few more minutes’ & ‘oh your meal is in the oven now’, that a manager should be notified, & that said manager should, AT THE VERY LEAST, stop by the table & acknowledge the issue. I wasn’t looking for a free meal, but a discount would have been nice OR EVEN AN APOLOGY, since we couldn’t eat our meals together! That was the 2nd time we tried that place. It’s a shame because we like to support local businesses, but we won’t be supporting them again. $56 for a meal we couldn’t enjoy together. Maybe $56 doesn’t sound like much to some people, but we work hard for our money & that is...

Review of Local Restaurant

UPDATE: I am very appreciative to Vinny for reaching out. He made this not great experience right. I appreciate the offer for lunch but that is really not necessary all I requested was done and the issues are being addressed. The food is good and I look forward to more great dining. Again, Thank you Vinny for reaching out. As you can see my rating has changed.

I am giving this restaurant a one-star rating due to my experience with Justin, who appears to be the manager or possibly a part-owner. I visited with a friend from Mt. Dora on Tuesday, a place I frequent, and I recommended it for lunch. They offer a great lunch menu, including six wings and a beer for $12.99. Since I don’t drink beer, I asked a staff member if I could substitute a soda, and she confirmed that I could. However, during my most recent visit, today, Thursday, when I placed my order at the register, the cashier informed me that it would be cheaper to order the wings separately and add a drink. This resulted in a subtotal of over $15. I questioned this, and the cashier mentioned something about beer service, which didn’t relate to my request. I asked to speak with the manager, Justin, with whom I had a prior negative experience. He was defensive and corrected me when I mistakenly said I visited on Monday, claiming they were closed that day. After showing him my bank charge from Tuesday, he remained unyielding and insisted that I shouldn’t have been served on that day. Ultimately, I requested to void my order, which he did without concern. The best customer service practice was to apologize for the misunderstanding on Tuesday, honor it today, and nicely explain that they would not be able to substitute a soda for a beer in the future. Which, of course, Justin did not do. I inquired about the owner's name, but he refused. However, I quickly found out through a Google search that the owner is Vinny and a person named Justin. I will refrain from using last names. When I returned to confirm this, Justin first said the name i mentioned was his last name, but he immediately denied it was him. In summary, Justin needs to improve his customer service skills. The restaurant is now closed on Mondays due to staffing issues, which I believe is linked to his management, if he treats his employees like his customers. I hope the actual owner reaches out to me, as I enjoy the food but find the service...

Here's the thing- the food was just as juicy as this review is about to be, so it's hard to rate this place so low. First of all, the pizza tasted amazing DESPITE getting our order wrong, which honestly saved this review from being 1 star. We ordered a 16in. cheese pie with 8 toppings- cooked well done.

Over the phone we were quoted $29 after the order was read back to us. Upon recieving the pizza the cashier charged us $33 and couldn't explain the discrepancy. 3 toppings were missing and it wasn't well done, but we only noticed 2 missing. We asked for them to be included, but since the cashier stated one had not been paid for, he charged us for an additional topping (even though they just added the uncooked toppings over the finished pie).

This time, we got the original receipt so we could figure out the discrepancy. Here's what we found out once we got home. The total before being double charged for the last topping was 30 plus tax and an undisclosed "non cash adjustment" of $1.28 that the cashier failed to mention even when we questioned the bill. This is our dilemma- we genuinely liked the pizza, even though it wasn't well done and was still missing one of the toppings we'd ordered.

Normally we wouldn't go back to a place that had that level of service, but the food was so good and the pizza cook was so nice that we feel like it deserves another shot. It's just hard to swallow being double charged for veggie toppings they forgot to include on the order AND being hit with a credit card fee at the card terminal which they tried to slide in under the radar. We have no problem paying cash but weren't told the difference.

So I guess the takeaway is this- check your order like you're leaving a Taco Bell drive-thru to make sure it's all there, ask for the itemized reciept, and bring cash so they don't hit you for $36+ on one pizza. But even if the order is wrong and you might get overcharged, you're still gonna...