Ottava — Restaurant in New York

I don’t write many bad reviews after working in the service industry for many years. However, this is about the third time I’ve dined here and had pretty poor service.

The excuse always is that they are understaffed. And the only reason why we’ve come back is because the food is good. However, we won’t be back this time. Being understaffed is one thing, completely ignoring customers, making poor decisions and giving bad service is a choice! Today, they were understaffed once again and it was a very busy day because of the weather. Again, you can easily check the weather forecast if you are a restaurant with an outdoor dining area to see whether you should be adding staff on for the day.

We waited 15 minutes before someone came to our table after seating us. Maybe longer! The problem with that is we were next to two tables that were getting service so they made a choice to ignore us as they continued to walk by and not even acknowledge us. They could’ve just simply said we are very sorry and we will be with you soon but nothing. I literally had to get up from my table, walk to the bar and grab the water bottle for our party.

It was freezing cold and everyone in the restaurant had their jackets on. I asked if there could be something done about the temperature and they acknowledged that the air conditioner was on but there was nothing they could do about it.

Our drinks sat at the bar while the bartender came out behind the bar and waited on tables next to us but let our drinks just sit there. Our server also walked past the bar with our drinks sitting there several times. Anyone in the service industry knows the saying, full hands in and full hands out. We were literally sitting next to the table that the bartender was helping. There were multiple opportunities to drop our drinks off. However, I had to ask for our drinks.

Another example of poor decision making and bad service, my mom asked for a cup of coffee and when the coffee was placed on the table it was spilt. Not a big deal. However, the bartender took away the dirty plate and never even came back to clean up the coffee spill all over the table. We were expected to do that.

Unfortunately, we like the food here and we like the restaurant group but it seems we always have issues with the service at this establishment. Maybe it’s just brunch but it doesn’t seem like they ever staff appropriately. Not sure if that would help but I...

Probably one of the worst dining experiences of my life. We decided to come to Park slope to check out any spots to eat and found Ottava. We went inside, we were greeted by the waitress with “Can I help You?”and the waitress said to us that the restaurant was closing and that she needed to take our order right away. She sat us outside, put the menus on the table and didn’t come back till 20 minutes later to take our order. We kept looking in the window to see where she was, and all we can see is the bartender on his phone the entire time. She came back and said “this is last call, so no more orders”, pretty rude if you ask me. The whole time we felt as we were being rushed out. She came back with our pizza and salad and look confused on where to place it on the table and awkwardly kept moving our glasses with her fingertips on the rims. The pizza barely had any toppings and was undercooked. The kale salad had too many salty components, no dressing, and was missing something to balance the salty flavor. . She didn’t come back for 30 minutes to check on us. Finally did with the check, didn’t say thank you, or nothing. But of course she came back right away the second time to make sure we were ready to...

I saw a recent post about Ottava and thought it looked like a nice cocktail spot to check out. I went on a Thursday lunch date with my fiancee and ordered a couple of their specialty cocktails and the flatbread. In terms of cocktails: the menu is very specialized and caters to more spirit-forward enjoyers. Many of the drinks contained two liqueurs on top of the base spirit, which is ok to some, but I’m not a fan so I took a while to order to see what cocktail would best suit my tastes (1 base spirit + fruit/herbs instead of liqueurs). Whatever I ended up choosing was too spirit-forward and too bitter for my taste— I should’ve read the ingredients more carefully. My fiancee ordered a pineapple cocktail, which was very sweet, but more refreshing than mine. We’ll need to give this bar another shot with different drinks since the ambience is a gorgeous...