LaScala's Fire Newtown Square — Restaurant in Newtown Township

Was so excited to go to dinner last night to try this new restaurant in our neighborhood. I had went to happy hour a month back and loved it so I was excited for my hubby and our friends to have dinner together.What a disappointment it was! We had an 8:00 reservation for a party of 4. We arrived a bit early, we were greeted right away and sat promptly. Took a good bit for our server to greet us, but she was pleasant and bubbly. We ordered 4 sodas and appetizers. Our appetizers arrived before we even received our sodas. The appetizers we ordered were fabulous! We got wings, calamari and the ricotta board. The ricotta board was one of the best appetizers I have ever had!! We then ordered dinner. This… not so good. Honestly, it was horrible!! We ordered clams and pasta, pasta with spinach and beans and salmon entree. The salmon came first. 10 minutes later the pasta dishes came. Then a few minutes after another pasta. The clams and pasta had a sour smell and the spinach and pasta were gross. After one bite we realized something was seriously off and we didn’t eat it. We waited for the waitress to come back and we told her. She apologized, offered another and worked to make it right. We decided to try a panini. It was just ok… don’t know if we were just tired of waiting or what, but we really didn’t eat it. I will say that sandwich was the only item we had the entire night that was fresh and hot. Salmon was good but veggies were cold. We disliked the open kitchen concept. This is basically that every thing comes out as it is ready. It’s ok if you’re sharing appetizers but this doesn’t work for dinner! It also felt very impersonal and awkward because your server basically takes your order, brings the drinks and then everything else is served by different people at all different times. Your server doesn’t really know what’s going on at your table.

Manager was kind and pleasant. He did check and apologize when we sent the unpleasantly smelly pasta back but not after that. To me, he missed a prime opportunity.

Overall, there is a lot of work that needs to be done to improve the entrees. I always give a place 3 tries before I throw the towel in and write a review but this was definitely a hard strike so I decided to write.

I will eventually try it again, but I would just have appetizers. I really hope things improve because we need a great restaurant in our area and I was really hopeful that this would be it. I hope you...

Regardless of whether they changed the name of this restaurant it was very clear that the attitude of some of its employees have carried over from the former. I rate the atmosphere high because the restaurant inside and outside is beautifully done and seemed to have a nice appeal. My husband and I went for lunch around 11-11:30ish. The restaurant was barely filled and since it was so nice outside we decided to sit in the enclosed outdoor dining area where there were more diners than inside, but still plenty of tables. My husband and I were seated where we waited…and waited…and waited some more for someone to come over to our table. We watched three dining tables who had their meals leave while two other tables were seated. We sat there and waited to see how long it would take before someone would come to our table…I made direct eye contact with a young, short haired, blonde waitress who had just seated a table of diners just catty-corner to us, walked right past us and went to another table and took their order who came in after us. She then left and when she came back she took the order of the table she had just sat catty corner to us!!! That’s when I knew for sure this was a matter of practiced racism. This girl didn’t plan on waiting on us! I really didn’t want to tie another incident of racism into this and I try to give people the benefit of doubt, but this young girls actions were blatant among a sparse crowd of diners; it was not like she was over-taxed with customers. I could not call this anything else but racism toward two customers who were black. Needless to say, we vowed never to go back to La Scala since the same practice seemed to have transferred from the former restaurant, Firepoint. We sat there for no less than half an hour waiting for even a glass of water and got nothing. It was embarrassing and sad to be treated this way. We didn’t want to make a big issue and although I did get the managers name as I had planned to contact, I decided that you can’t change people’s thinking and practiced behavior, so a review might be best. We weren’t welcomed there and it’s not a place I want to do future business with that...

I have to say it will be our first and last dinner experience ever at LaScala's Fire Newtown Square. Our dinner on Sunday night was absolutely awful!!! One of the worst for sure. I was there with my wife and my mother-in-law. We ordered mussels in a red sauce as an appetizer. The mussels were foul tasking as well as the red sauce they were sitting in. None of us could eat them or even dip our bread in the sauce because of the bad ripe taste. When our waitress came back and asked how they were, I told her they were bad and we couldn't them. She said I'm sorry to hear, and asked if we wanted to order anything else. We said we would go right to our entree's. We ordered the Lemon Crab & Shrimp over linguini, Angel Hair with Crab, and the Veal Marsala. The Lemon Crab & Shrimp was the only edible entree that was served to us, and even that was way over zested with lemon. There literally was no crab to be found on the Angel Hair Crab dish and the remaining flavor left on the over cooked Angel Hair wasn't worth the calories(according to my wife). My dish, the Veal Marsala was probably one of the top three worst tasting Veal Marsala dishes I ever had. The brown sauce was watered down and the veal tasted like slabs of wet cardboard. The sun dried tomatoes that came with the dish were the best part of my meal. When our waitress returned and asked how our dinners were, I told her they were really bad, mine tasted like cardboard, there was no crabmeat on the Angel Hair, and the Lemon zest was way too overpowering. I told her she needed to tell her manager how bad their food was. She said ok, I will, is there be anything else you would like to order? I told her were were finished, and they cleared our table. Our check arrived a few minutes later without the manager, and without any deductions whatsoever for the foul food that was served. Since it wasn't our servers fault that the food was soooo bad, I paid the check, left her an appropriate tip, and left to never ever return. Thank God there was an ice cream parlor close by to fill the void in our stomach's and to get rid of the foul food taste...