Giovanni's Family Restaurant — Restaurant in Johnson City

I’ve been to the location many of times and have had nothing but a great experience. I decided to bring a group of friends with me to eat on Tuesday night 9/26. Our server, Alyssa, was the definition of how not to treat a table. Our experience started off terribly when she asked what we wanted to drink and when all 8 of us went around the table and said “waters” she laughed and says “okay so all waters great” and it made us uncomfortable but we dismissed it. Key note in this story is the restaurant was not busy at all. There were maybe 3 other tables other than us in the restaurant. Then after ordering we waited 25 minutes for our appetizers to come out and then 5 minutes later our food comes out. This whole 25 minutes of us waiting for appetizers Alyssa never came to refill our drinks and we finally stopped her just to get us more water and then she proceeds to bring a picture of lukewarm water when none of us have ice since our drinks are empty. One of my friends food hadn’t came out and we were more than 5 minutes into eating our food until we had to flag down Alyssa and ask where her food was. Alyssa then tells us that the kitchen forgot to make her eggplant Parmesan so it would be about 10 minutes. At this point we are all almost finished with our food when the eggplant Parmesan comes out. It came out mushy, dry, and distasteful. It looked like it had been baking in the sunlight and all the sauce was dried onto the noodles. We then had to flag Alyssa down again and let her know of the issues with the food and my friend asked since she only took 2 bites of it, one bite being myself to try it, if she could get it taken off her bill. My friend hands Alyssa the plate and she proceeds to stare at it like she doesn’t know what to do with it and then Alyssa says “so you don’t need a box” and my friend reply’s with “no I apologize but I can’t eat this” and Alyssa looked dumbfounded and walks away not apologizing or anything about the distasteful meal or the fact my friend waited so long for this distasteful meal. Alyssa comes by and asks how we are doing checks and she then brings the checks and hands my friend the check for the eggplant Parmesan. We hand Alyssa our cards and my friend try’s to stop her before Alyssa runs off with our bills. When she comes back my friend tells Alyssa that she is kind of confused because she didn’t eat any of her meal and it was not good and she is still having to pay for it. Alyssa responds with “sorry I can’t take it off” so my friend asks for a manager. As Alyssa is walking out we see her mouthing “what the fuck” and rolling her eyes. Alyssa never comes back to our table and a manager never approaches us so I stop another server to again ask for a manager. A manager comes and we explain to him what our problem is and he lets us know that he will take it off for my friend. When the manager comes back with the bill taken off he lets us know that my friend will be refunded for the purchase within 24 hours and we are confused because my friend never handed Alyssa her card. The manager tells us that the bill was run with a card ending in “2005” and that was another persons card at our table. So Alyssa had used my other friends card to pay for the eggplant Parmesan meal plus my friends meal. The manager apologized to us but we wanted an apology from Alyssa but she refused to come back to our table and then proceeds to go talk to the other server making hand gestures and giving us the stank eye. Safe to say we won’t be back and it is very frustrating because I love the food hear and I have never had a bad experience but this experience made me never want to return. Alyssa has no communication skills, no manners, no professional, and no empathy. Even the other server was giving us the stank eye and they kept laughing and pointing at us so the whole atmosphere that night made us completely uncomfortable and we were completely nice to Alyssa. We never said anything out of the way and we even apologized to her for not liking the food. Alyssa...

We stopped by Giovanni’s tonight and I was so excited to see they had a keto menu! I haven’t encountered many Italian places that offer a full low-carb menu. Unfortunately, my salad arrived with a big ugly black hair nestled under the carby croutons so I pushed the salad away. Because our server didn’t check back with us for about 20 minutes, my uneaten salad sat in front of me waiting to be sent back while my family finished their salads. When the server brought our food, I told her about the hair. She apologized calmly and brought me another salad. I didn’t badly want the salad while my zucchini pasta was sitting in front of me getting cold. The zucchini with meat sauce was fine. Not impressive and somewhat watery, but I was glad to have anything that resembled Italian food. I didn’t expect magic when working with zucchini instead of pasta. My husband reported that his manicotti was “ok”. The keto bread was pretty great, so that was a nice surprise. I did bite into the regular bread before my keto bread arrived because t he server failed to tell me the bread she put in front of my plate wasn’t my low-carb bread.

I thought/hoped our server may offer to comp at least my drink or the bread for the salad with a hair in it, but she didn’t. She wasn’t a bad server but also was not particularly proactive or much beyond “ok” in her service delivery. I’m not a demanding customer but I was confused why a hair in food and a long wait was not a prompt to offer a customer some kind of small compensation or soft drink on the house. For these reasons, I can only give this place a 3 star review. I’d like to try their keto desserts around the holidays but sadly won’t make this a...

We went to Giovannis specifically because they have a keto menu. The dish we ordered was absoloutely delicious but the keto menu pricing is wrong. When we brought it up the waitress asked someone about it and was told they charge more because of the zucchini noodles. Which would make sense BUT the spicy chicken pasta on the regular menu is 14.99 where as the spicy chicken pasta on the keto menu is 15.99. Same exact dish, just zucchini noodles instead of regular pasta. So one would think the extra dollar was for the zucchini. When we got the bill we were charged 31.98 for the entrees (2 spicy chicken pastas at the higher keto rate of 15.99 each) and then an extra 5.98 for zucchini. When I asked the waitress to fix it because I should only have to pay what the menu says all I got from her was attitude. I even apologized to her to let her know I knew it wasn't her fault and I wasn't trying to give her a hard time. She then told me she didn't make the menu prices. She then had who I'm assuming was the manager come out from the back to tell me that they have to charge more because of covid and the menu prices are 2 years old. He explained that they knew the menu prices were wrong and they didn't have to give me a keto menu. They only provided it because I asked for it. I suggested maybe a new menu with correct prices, or a sharpie marker at least to fix it. I also suggested maybe the wait staff could give customers a heads up that the menu pricing is wrong. The manager was very nice and did finally fix the price for us but they whole exchange was unnecessary. Customers shouldn't be surprised with extra charges after they have already...