Buca di Beppo Italian Restaurant — Restaurant in Huntington Beach

We were treated to a dinner here last week and it is just lousy. I remembered why I hate Buca di Beppos.

First we ate in the Pope Room, as a Catholic I can say it is kinda weird... I mean I can appreciate all of it. But since I am guessing most people are not Catholic dedicating a room to the Pope is odd. In fact we were among the last to arrive in the party and the poor protestants we were supping with had already had the bust of Pope John Paul II removed from the room. I have seen it before, and having the Pope's head in the middle of a lazy Susan is kind of creepy.

We were a large party, but that doesn't excuse the slow service, it is not like we didn't have reservations. Or that since there is a room constantly booked for large parties, they should be properly staffed for it. Especially if when it gets close to the time for the next party they are rushing you out. Come on, if it didn't take forever to bring the order we'd be gone naturally.

Food was poor to mediocre at best. The selections were Spaghetti and demolished meatball pieces, Chicken Parmesan and Pasta Alfredo. The Alfredo was simply inedible, how can you go wrong with pouring a box of Spaghetti into boiling water and the Chicken was actually edible. There was also a salad and horrible cheesecake type something. It didn't taste like any cheesecake I have ever had. There was no crust, and tasted like it was missing salt and other ingredients that bring out the flavor. Maybe it was some kind of healthy, sugar free, salt free, gluten free dessert substitute.

So I was seated near the host so I saw the bill, so for 3 bowls of salad, 3 bowls of each of the 3 entrees, and 18 slices of wannabe cheesecake it was $568 including tax and tip with soft drinks for some of the people. No alcohol that I saw was served. That's more than $31 per person!!! Sorry I would've come a little unglued if I were paying for that... For $50 I could go to Costco and buy a lot more and better frozen Italian food that could be thrown in the oven and taste 100x better. Even pick up a $6 box of garlic bread with 27 slices. Yeah I would have to work a little to cook it, but for $500 it would be worth it.

Parking was awful, we circled twice and were late to the dinner, so we just parked in the "to go" spot, nobody said anything.

One last humorous event, before the kicked us out, someone stopped by with a digital camera and had everyone bunch up on the far side of the dirty table and took a picture. Then came back with 4 pictures with a Buca di Beppo's border around them and said we could buy the pictures (which are going in the trash if we didn't anyway) for $10 each. Really??? We took pictures at the event ourselves and for a couple dollars I could print everyone at the table 8x10 photos if...

Let me start by saying we were a party of 8 that could not get seated at the Bucca in Anaheim so we called Huntington Beach and they said they would seat us and gave us a reservation, awesome!! When we arrived at we had about a 10 min wait and then was seated. Right away we could see that our waitress was overwhelmed. She was happy and energetic but definitely overwhelmed. We ordered drinks, 2 calamari’s and 3 different salads to start and asked for house bread. The calamari never came and we only got bread at the end of the meal. Our waitress was doing 90% of the work on our floor, she was the waitress, the bus boy, the entertainment and a runner. Other employees were just wandering around lost. She did it all, we even watched as she basically had to beg fellow workers to sing happy birthday to the guests. Our waitress deserves 5 stars by far, she was in tears at the end of the night, we asked the manager to check on our calamari and we asked her to remove it from our bill because it never came so she thought we were upset with her and I explained to her that we can tell that she is doing her best and we see the other employees sitting around and waking around doing next to nothing, she cried. She then cleared all of the dishes from our table by her self, it sounds like I’m being dramatic, but we went to Bucca tonight to celebrate my daughters birthday and all we could focus on is how 1 employee is being run ragged, customers are upset and other workers are not pitching in and management doesn’t care. To top it off it’s her job to sweep the carpet with a broom as part of her side work. Our waitress is a strong proud mother working to put her kids through college, who is very good at her job! Our food was pretty good but definitely not worth $431 The manager was friendly and funny and we really enjoyed the birthday desserts, honestly the best birthday desserts we...

What a dump. We planned to go there for a month and I was really looking forward to it since we come all the way from the high desert. Walking into the place we found an overwhelming stench and I'm not sure what it was but it had been a long drive so we went to the bathroom and found that the toilets look like they had not been cleaned in months and there was urine all over the floor. This was at 4:30 in the afternoon and the place was virtually empty of customers. Walking to our table we passed a bunch of display bottles of wine that look like they hadn't been wiped of dust in at least a week or so not to mention the fake dry flowers that were so filthy they were completely discovered in really need to be thrown away years ago. Well they seated us and across from our table was a countertop with dirty used napkins and close to that was the bus clean up tray full of old food and dirty dishes and that was fairly disgusting. I finally got fed up and just ask for the manager. I explained to him how far ahead we planned and how far we drove to hopefully have a good experience because we wanted something a little more flavorful then our local Olive Garden and I had him walk with me first to the bathroom and then to the counters and then looked at all the dirt and filth in all I could get out of this guy was pretty much just excuses about "Well it was busy a while ago and that's why things were dirty" and I'm going well that kind of dirt doesn't happen in an hour it happens on a consistent basis and explained to him that that was the reason that we were leaving when he had asked if there was anything that he could do for us. We left and had an excellent dinner at the...