Toscana Little Italy — Restaurant in Jacksonville

I came here with my husband and son around 7:15 on a Friday night. We were able to be seated right away. My husband had the veal piccata and my son had veal saltambocca. I had the eggplant parmesan. We shared a carafe of house chianti. The meals came with a choice of soup or salad (we all had soup) and garlic rolls or plain rolls. The rolls are served hot and they are large- crusty outside, soft inside. The server will bring you more if you ask. My husband and son enjoyed their veal dishes. There were fresh tomatoes on my husband's veal piccata, which I've never seen used, but he liked it. The eggplant parmesan was nice and tender. I liked that the tomato sauce was not too sweet or overpowering, but I wish it had a bit more flavor. My son and I had the house soup - a sausage, spinach, and potato concoction in a light creamy broth. It was a little spicy and very tasty. My husband chose the Italian wedding soup. He said it was good, but next time he would go back to the house soup. The menu had enough choices for everyone without being too overwhelming. The prices are moderate. The service was very attentive. I have had their pizza and calzones on occasion when we have ordered take out. Both are good, but the calzones are amaxung! The large size is enough to feed two hungry people and the dough and fillings are very tasty. I can see Toscana becoming one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants....

The service. Yes, twice we have had such slow and ineffective service that it just becomes tedious to go into this restaurant and have the servers walking around in a daze and have no cohesiveness to the plan of serving people. Where is the management here? The food is mediocre at best. But, what really surprised me was the use of boxed mashed potatoes. I ordered a somewhat pricey sirloin and was so disappointed at the first taste of the potatoes. Who does that anymore in supposedly fine dining establishments? I made a point of not embarrassing my tablemates by asking the server while we were eating but questioned another server on the way out, privately. She had no idea how the potatoes were prepared and when I told her I was a restaurant consultant and that knowledge of the menu was of utmost importance she kind of laughed it off. She did, very pleasantly, ask the chef and confirmed my suspicion about the potatoes. Also, my number one complaint in restaurants these days is that they auction off the food. The server sends someone else out to deliver the food and the runner shows up questioning who gets what. And then, often, the previous course has not been cleared and they expect me, the customer, to move my dishes around to accommodate the next dish. I just hate that. And I find it super unprofessional anymore when you are paying good prices for a meal out. Alas, another restaurant to cross...

We visited on a Friday night and fortunately only had a short wait despite several empty tables, likely due to lack of servers. Menu was full of appetizing selections and made use a a build your own style approach for may of their dished which I applaud. Salad and app were acceptable but nothing spectacular. We had to ask twice for bread and it didn't arrive until after entrées. Normally this would just about be the end of things, but you could tell by looking at the sauce for the sausage and peppers, that this wasn't your run of the mill marinara. It turned out to be an especially bold, spicy take that is was so glad to have bread still available to soak it up. In hind sight I should have taken our server up on her offer of fresh mozzarella, but I like to try things the way the chef intends them, at least the first time. Overall I'm going to have to say that I found it spicier than I expected, or cared fore. My wife tried the tour of Italy, and while we both thoroughly enjoyed the lasagna (with a more typical sauce) we both agreed the fettuccine alfredo reminded us of sugar cookies (and not in a good way). I will give them credit, when we spoke to our server regarding our concerns she apologized and made a very reasonable adjustment to the check. It may just be a matter of finding our favorites, but I suspect we...