IL Giardino — Restaurant in Miami Beach

The only word used to describe these guys is "CHEATS". I spent a week in Florida recently and was very happy with the trip until on my last day, we were walking past this restaurant after a wonderful time spent at Miami Beach. The waitress literally pulled us in with an offer of buy one get one drink free. She sounded very nice and accommodating and despite our repeated questions, we were told that we only pay for one drink and hence they brought us two drinks along with a mocktail drink for my son. Our drinks looked so nice that even passers by stopped to take a look and take pictures. One Belgian couple also sat down because of us and had friendly chat with us. Upon finishing, the total for the check was $171 ($60 per drink, yes two of them), $15 for my son's fruit punch and $25 service charges and taxes. They said that the drinks were per person and that we should get two more for free drinks. This was ridiculous. When we complained and wished to speak to the Manager, we were taken behind the restaurant and a bouncer was called. We were intimidated, threatened with dire consequences etc. When I asked to call the Police, I was threatened with arrest for not paying the bill. The Belgian couple suffered the same fate with a check of $152 and they were taken aside separately. My wife and 6 year old son were very scared and all they wanted was to leave the place ASAP. I had to give up as I did not want to compromise on my family for $80 but left with a very bad taste about Miami and the people who cheated us. We had come to the place to have fun but sadly, I left with an incident I will never forget. I filed a dispute with my credit card company and they helped us with the money. PLEASE AVOID this place at all costs. These guys should not be running...

Never in my life have I ever witnessed such deceit. They had staff in the street begging us to come enjoy their special. They claimed "buy one cocktail get one free plus 2 shots of tequila.I knew something was up when they brought margarita shots instead of tequila. What came next was shocking. They brought 2 HUGE COCKTAILS unlike the size of any cocktail ever seen. I thought to myself this isn't going to be as cheap as expected but at least I got 128 ounces of drinks.The drinks were so sweet they literally were syrup. Ok bad drinks and a weird overall experience were not enough to get me to write this review. What followed is what really put things over the top. So technically all I should be paying for is one cocktail a rather large one albeit I ordered a plain cocktail due to the special. They gave me a check of 78.00. While politely trying to explain this mess to my waitress another couple came over claiming they had the same exact situation. My verbal skills were far too much for this basic waitress to handle so a manager was called. She insisted we have the conversation inside away from the other customers. I immediately realized that she wanted to be away so no other customers would join in and try to negotiate. There were much theatrics between the manager and waitress that were clearly rehearsed beforehand in efforts to get the money from innocent customers but I wasn't having it. I ended up paying 38.00 The craziest thing is the guy next to me ended up paying 120.00 for the same drinks. STAY AWAY SHAME ON THIS CROOKED...

Highly DO NOT RECOMMEND. My boyfriend and I were on vacation and got lulled by the good music in August 2017 and the promise of getting 1 drink extra after buying one $10 drink. When we finally got bills, they slammed us with $50 each price for our drinks (including the promised free one that we didn't even touch). Plus the automatic gratuity to that.

Update after reading the owner response attached:

Please do not try to discredit my review which came out of a real, honest experience. You may not have a $12 drink but I remember that night being lulled by a discount on drinks- which put the cost at $10 (so that price we got was at a discount plus the next drink being off) and even the seafood was also discounted (which thankfully, we declined the seafood otherwise we would have been duped out of even higher money). Only to get our bills and we charged $50 each for the drinks! (mind you, for glasses not bottles).

And yes, I am aware that restaurants in ocean drive all do auto gratuity BUT I found it callous and mean that your restaurant would do that after cheating us out of our money. We were just two young people trying to have fun.

Again, do not make excuses because this is a real life experience. I'm sure my boyfriend probably even left a review too around that time. If you guys are better now, all well and good. I just do not plan to go back. That experience gave our vacation a bad taste. We can always try reputable restaurants on Ocean Drive like...