Milano — Restaurant in Hardyston Township

Let me start by giving some small bit of background. I am a chef, culinary school trained. I have worked in the industry for well over 25 years. I have worked in small mom and pop operations and I have worked in large corporate operations with celebrity chefs names attached. I know the industry. I know food cost. I know good food and I know bad. This was definitely bad food.

I wanted this experience to be good. I love pasta. I was kind of excited to try this place randomly the other day when I decided to take my girlfriend on a date. To say it disappointed would be an understatement.

We started with the Eggplant rollatini app. The Eggplant itself was cold and mushy. The ricotta filling was gritty and completely lacking in flavor.

Next was the salad. A terrible mix of clearly old, wilted lettuce, drenched in an oily mess of dressing. It came with 1 small cherry tomato and 1 slice of cucumber on top of a bed of extremely wilted greens. I suppose drowning it in this messy dressing was to cover up the fact that the lettuce should've been tossed in the dumpster 4 days earlier?

The entrees were yet another extremely lack luster example of this restaurant. My girlfriend ordered a Chicken and Eggplant dish. It came slathered in a brown sauce I can only think of as being a jarred demiglace? The chicken was of extremely poor quality, hard and rubbery in texture. The eggplant, once again, mushy. This dish was served with over cooked, mushy vegetables.

I ordered the shrimp in a white wine sauce over angel hair with wilted arugula. The shrimp were probably the only edible part of this meal. I found that my pasta was swimming in a white wine broth that left the pasta extremely over cooked.

Upon seating we noticed a neighboring table ordering desserts that were clearly out of the box, frozen desserts. It seems as if not much is freshly made here.

In all my years of doing this, I can spot poor quality and cut corners. This place has to be one of the biggest corner cutters I've seen so far. It is Italian food. This food does not require much effort to make it well. It takes a little bit of love and care to make an excellent Italian dish. If you ever had an Italian mom or grandmother, you would know this. If you are cutting corners, using poor ingredients, frozen products, and trying to fool people into believing this is good, I have bad news for you. You are only fooling yourself. This restaurant is honestly below the level of the Olive Garden in my opinion. At least the Olive Garden tries to make their food taste like something.

The decor of this place reminds me of a late 1990s restaurant trying to hard to fit into the modern world. Even the sound system was awful, playing a poor, italian disco version of Gloria at a very low level as we sat down followed by commercials. I mean, could you at least shell out for an ad free version of Pandora?

As a chef this place is the epitome of what is wrong with my industry. It screams of people coming in and grabbing at a buck. I can imagine some guys in the kitchen being paid the lowest amounts because an owner is being too cheap to hire a quality chef to run the operation with love. And because it is close to a resort, the concept of throwing a silk hat on a pig applies and people will continue to be fooled into eating there.

So, in my personal opinion, don't be like me and do what I did, taking $80 worth of msuhy food home to toss out. Just avoid this place. Maybe it will do the area a favor and close and reopen as a Mexican restaurant or something...

Terrible Easter meal :( I see this place always has a ton of cars on the weekends and so we thought that when our original pick for a restaurant had a building fire, we would try this one out, finally. Very disappointing to say the least. We asked to move our reservation to an hour later (from 6pm to 7pm) knowing the restaurant closes two hours later (9pm). Shouldn't be an issue but we were asked to please be on time so we can order before the kitchen closes. Odd to me, because if a restaurant is open until a certain time, generally they are serving food until that time. We got there a few minutes early to be safe. We were unaware of it being BYOB and luckily had a bottle of wine in the car, from earlier in the day. The waitress opened it and we ordered appy's shortly after. While waiting for appy's, my husband ran to a liquor store 3 mins down the road because there were 5 adults at the table. The waitress seemed anxious and timid and started talking to the hostess while my husband was gone. That's when the hostess rudely came over and said, "You're gonna have to put in your order if you want dinner. We held the kitchen open for you, when we moved the reservation to a later time and now you're waiting for another person? Wasn't he just here?" I replied, "Yes, he'll be back momentarily. We didn't know the restaurant was BYOB. We can order without him though." She gave a half smile, as if dissatisfied that we didn't argue back. Once dinner was brought out, they began cleaning up the restaurant around us and some other tables that were still eating. It was loud and obnoxious and all table service was abandoned when the waitstaff began eating together, at the corner table, in the restaurant. I couldn't care less where anyone eats, but when I can't get the check for over 30 minutes...perhaps a break schedule should be worked out. Just a thought. Overall - mediocre restaurant, with a very limited selection of pre-frozen and over-salted/under seasoned food. The crusty hostess could also use a good manual on customer service...being rude, unapproachable and scrolling through your phone when someone approaches the hostess station (in your mid-50's) is extremely juvenile and it's no wonder you are still a hostess, at your age. The waitstaff on the other hand, was super friendly and inviting and deserve a raise, after being pointed at and having orders barked at them, by their finger snapping (for emphasis on hurrying up) hostess. I literally mean she snapped her fingers at the waitstaff to hurry up, while they were eating, in front of everyone. We all found it very uncomfortable and only opted to skip coffee (which we NEVER do) because we couldn't stand to be there any longer. Dunkin Donuts afterward was quite pleasant!

Edit: Forgot to mention that gratuity is included at 20%...which is no big deal, except that it was handwritten very small, in the lower right hand corner, of the check. If I hadn't done the math on the actual food, we would have left another 20% on top of our bill...

This was one of the worst restaurant experiences I’ve ever had.

Upon entering the restaurant my party of five was greeted by a very kind hostess, Chris (possibly Kris) who lead us to our table and provided us with water. She informed us our waiter would be with us shortly.

Myself and one of the women in our party were wearing tank tops and shorts. As I sat down at our table, our waiter David pointed at me and said “I need to get you a shirt.” Not a hello. Not a reminder of an apparent policy. No gentle suggestion. Just a pointed statement. I left the restaurant to grab a tee shirt from my car. As I walked back in, there was a gentleman sitting at a table also wearing a tank top. Specifically a black wife beater. I have no problem abiding by a dress code if it is posted and enforced for everyone in the restaurant.

Then comes the food. We were told it was a great bang for our buck meal. We were provided soup and salad. The soup was flavored water with three diced potatoes and around 6-8 lentil beans. We were then told that the dressing was the best part of the salad, which was roughly 20 pieces of lettuce with one half of a tomato and one cucumber slice. It was completely soaked in oil and vinegar.

Our party ordered 2 calamari dishes for appetizers. The calamari was frozen. It had no flavor and was extremely rubbery. It had not been properly fried nor had it even felt as though it had been warmed.

Then came dinner. We all ordered standard Italian options. Two rigatonis, one shrimp scampi, an Alfredo dish, and one standard spaghetti dish. All of our dishes were swimming in sauce. The shrimp were frozen and rubbery. Again, no flavor. The only upside of any of the food was that they seem to use Prego sauce for the vodka sauce.

Do not give this place...