La Mia Cucina — Restaurant in Pacific Grove

Many, many things wrong and odd with this restaurant. No idea how it has such a good rating. This may not be huge deal to others but the pricing was a little extreme. Twenty five odd dollars for a plate of noodles and tomato sauce? A little ridiculous. Nine dollars for lettuce, 8 croutons, and flakes of cheese? The food was mediocre at best and definitely not worth the price they were put at. Split pea and ham soup absent of any ham whatsoever. Lettuce clearly rotting and then covered in what was basically ranch to try to hide it. Then comes the odd. The table was covered in two layers of cloth and underneath a foam-leather table with holes and rips. The restaurant didn't have a bathroom and instead used the neighboring apartment buildings bathroom. The service was decent but they were over polite and friendly to the point of being completely unnatural. One of them walked by me with a good foot between us and she said excuse me and apologized several times. When she walked by again she did the same thing. Sidenote: The starter bread is not free. I have never been to an Italian restaurant that the bread was free. It simply felt that many corners were cut and that they were trying to suck your money away.

Edit: Actually I believe there is an explanation for the good reviews. All the customers were extremely friendly and talkative with the staff. I believe that because of this connection they are either biased or were served better food

I would like to say before I am accused of lying or something that these are my personal experiences, observations,...

It gets 3 stars because the food was great.

I wish this place could get a few more stars but not now… note there was a group of 11 of us and we had 2 kids in the party..

I called a week in advanced since we had a large party and they said that was fine. As the day comes our party goes from 19 to 11 and I let the restaurant know. A snide comment was made due to my lateness of letting them know our party was less then expected…I let it go…

We get there on time for our reservation and they have us seated at 2 different round tables not even put together…a little odd but we went with it.service was really slow so make sure you are not in a hurry if you give them a chance.

We order our meals, we get the bread and then 20 minutes later we get the soup/salad which was just ok….

Then meals come out and they are all very good and flavorful! I ended up with the simple ricotta ravioli and I wanted more then what was on my plate after I had finished.

End of the meal comes and we had brought a few cakes to enjoy. And ate those and then the bill comes. They charged us for cake service even though they didn’t cut or serve us the cake we had brought.. so we were charged $21 for 6 plates and 6 forks that they let us use…not to mention they over charged the other table in our party for their meals and a cake service fee as well..

Make sure if you check them out to give yourself lots of time and try the...

Sometimes, the Stars don't line up. We had a very mixed experience at La Mia Cucina tonight. They were busy when we arrived for a late service, at around 7:45pm. As warned, we waited about 10 minutes to be seated, all was good. We got water and excellent bruschetta, but no one came to take our order. After 20+ minutes, I was able to get someone's attention, and a few minutes later, we placed our order. The calamari was also excellent. My wife and I ordered the fresh sandabs. Our plates arrived after a little while, and maybe it's only because of the previous incident that we feared we had been forgotten. I found my fish very blend. It was obviously fresh and properly seared, but the preparation was just uninteresting, with just a few capers on top. My wife seemed also unimpressed, and used salt, which I took as a sign. It's only towards the end of my plate, long after I had complained about how blend the preparation was, that I noticed that my wife's plate looked different. Under her fish was a sauce, the sauce that had simply been completely missing from my plate... I told the waiter, but of course by then, it was too late to rectify. They did not charge us for the calamari as an apology. The staff we spoke to was always the most pleasant. Whatever happened in the kitchen tonight, we won't know, but clearly, at least for us, it was...