Dino's Pizzeria — Restaurant in North Mankato

Dino's is a hit-and-miss experience. I want to love them because it's locally owned and there are so few good places to eat in North Mankato. Generally, the food can be pretty good, but dining in the restaurant can be unpleasant because it's SO LOUD and dark, and service can be slow. I've had servers basically forget about us and never get refills. We often order ahead and do pickup, put even that can be problematic. Like tonight.

Because it's consistently slow service -- even for pickup -- my mom called at 6:15 to find out how long it would take to get a pizza. They said 45 minutes, so we placed an order for a pizza, a pasta dish and the hummus appetizer. My dad left 40 minutes after the order was placed to pick it up. But when he got there, it wasn't ready. They said it would be 15 minutes. 25 minutes later they said the pizza was ready, but the salad needed to be prepared. After 45 minutes of waiting, he was told the pizza was coming out of the oven soon. By the time the order was ready, it had been 95 minutes since the order was placed. All this time he waited at the bar, but no one asked if he wanted a drink. When he finally got the order, they gave him a voucher for a free 12-inch pizza as a "we're sorry." An appreciated gesture.

But when he got home, we discovered the pizza and the pasta were cold. Not like "kind of warm." COLD. So cold that the mozzarella was a hard lump - not soft and stretchy like when cheese is hot.

The free 12 inch was a nice offer, but the whole ordeal was such a pain we'll just go to Pieology next time where the pizza is made fast and it's...

Love love love this place ❣️❣️ that was 6 yrs ago.. I'm here today and what a difference sadly... The staff Emily and I believe Lauren are the servers, I literally watched them basically chase customers right out the door. Telling people it's at least a 45 minute wait. I saw tables that were just about finishing up with their meals. As a waitress myself for many years I knew it would not be 45 minutes. I let Emily know that a couple tables are almost done so I will just wait a little bit here. She certainly did not like that and rather snippy said that's fine... one of the parties ahead of me had put their name in... when a table emptied 5 minutes after I said I would wait it took them 10 minutes to call the party that was ahead of me. By that time another table opened I'm still standing and waiting to be seated they phoned the party again crossed that party off the list 3 minutes later came to seat me.. As I was waiting two more parties came in and also were told at least a 45 minute wait... not good resturant workers... they literally chased 3 parties out the door... they were not happy especially seeing open tables that the hockey players were not using. Any good server checks tables and figures about how long the wait is before just saying almost an hour wait... on top of it I am here with a free pizza coupon from a horrible pizza I had here a month ago... the servers we quite rude and snotty... Sorry Dino's I...

My wife and I went to Dino's with our son and daughter in law and their 3 small children at 4:15 on Saturday for our anniversary. We had to wait several minutes for someone to seat us. We were told it would be 25-30 minutes for a table even though there were 7 empty tables because they couldn't move 2 tables next to each other together. No reason why not, just said they couldn't. After a few minutes we said we would take 2 separate tables next to each other because of the small children. The person doing the seating wasn't happy about that but did seat us. We ordered for the kids right away and took a few minutes deciding what us adults were having. After we got the food for the kids a large table opened up. I asked the staff if we could move to that table as is wasn't great being split up. They said they thought they might have another group coming for the table (they told us they didn't take reservations?). I said we were here first and they knew we wanted a larger table. They said we had already been seated so they didn't think they could but they would let us know. They set up the table and seated a party of 3 at the 6 chair table. No one came and said anything about us not being able to move. The only pleasant person out of the 4 or 5 we dealt with was our server who did a good job. We...