Buca di Beppo Italian Restaurant — Restaurant in Redondo Beach

I’m not even sure where to begin…My husband and I were visiting from NJ and decided to take the family out for Christmas dinner as our daughter’s house is undergoing a renovation. Our grandkids are 3 and 7, so family style Italian made sense and Buca di Beppo was highly rated. We were running a couple of minutes late and called to let them know we were on our way (we arrived 12 minutes late). The manager greeted us at the door with “I was just about to give away your table” (not in a joking way).

The service was terrible only second to the food, which was over garlicked and basically just bowls of pasta with little else. After an excruciating wait, the waitress plops our order on the table and runs away. We ordered lasagna and were not warned that the plate was extremely hot. The lasagna was dropped on the table in front of the 3-year-old. My husband went to move it and was severely burned (blisters immediately formed on both hands and he was in extraordinary amount of pain). He cooks regularly and is used to handling hot things, but he said that this was like holding hot coals. It upset the entire evening. He was in pain; the kids were upset and neither the server nor the manager were anywhere to be found.

I approached the manager (Antonius Vandermosust) to let him know what happened and he looked at me and giggled. When I asked him for the owner’s information, he gave me a stupid answer that ownership has recently changed and that he didn’t know the new owner’s information. REALLY??? What absolute B.S. He could tell by the look on my face that I was deadly serious, and his tone changed. He started to apologize and then the waitress saw me speaking with him and joined in the apology. They offered to discount the food, but that was hardly the point. I was most upset about the fact that my granddaughter could have been severely injured and that my husband was.

Having worked for years in restaurants, I understand that having dinner out on Christmas is not ideal. I anticipated the service to be slow and the food perhaps not to be 100% delicious. I get it. BUT, what we experienced was beyond unacceptable and completely irresponsible. The manager’s reaction was abhorrible and showed his level of incompetence in dealing with the public. For this reason, my family in LA will never return to Buca di Beppo and I warn others that it is not...

The food here has always been good and plentiful, although I don't remember it being so expensive.

All sharable dishes are 50$ and up, all small dishes are 35-40$. Now with that said they are all sharable between 2 or 3 people (small) to 4-6 people (large, but those numbers are relative to how much you eat, for me, cut that number in half).

We (wife and I) got the lasagna. It was tasty, a bit dry, with lots of ricotta and some meat. It was the full size, and we are about 1/2 of it. We had to ask for some extra marinara sauce due to the dry ricotta. But it was not bad.

This is still a good place for much. They have reasonable prices 15-20$ and you get protein and pasta. Oh I forgot to mention the dinner portions don't come with anything, it's all ala cart. So 55$ chicken Parmesan is a plate of just that, no pasta to accompany it, that is separate and another 30-50$....

So this place can get pricey. But for a large group it is probably still worth it. Unless they all eat like me and you eat, 2 pieces of Parm and some pasta....

You have to ask for the complementary bread, why you have to ask for it is beyond me. They should ask you if you want "complementary" bread. If you say no, good for them. But had we not asked the waitress made it feel like we would not have gotten any. Why do they have a don't ask don't tell policy for bread??? It's not like your watching your carbs at this place??

Overall, the food is good, the service was ok (place was not busy on a Sunday at 6, but was picking up as the night went on) and waitress would disappear for stretches at a time), the atmosphere is the same as it was 10 years ago (which is a good thing), the prices are a bit high as Italian food is simple to make and doesn't use particularly expensive ingredients for the most part.

I would still recommend, just wish everything was 5 to 10$ cheaper.

PS. sorry for the picture of the partially consumed lasagna, we were too...

Normally I love coming to Buca. My friends and I have been coming here for years to celebrate each other’s birthdays its been our little tradition now for many many years. However, today I was completely let down. First off I called to make a reservation they said I had to have called 2 hrs before my reservation mind you when I called it was 6 and I was making the reservation for 7:30 they said they couldn’t take reservations if it wasn’t 2 Hrs ahead however my friend suggested I try online and I was able to. If only that were the only issue so we show up at 7:28 and someone helps us and point us to our table from the gecko the host says she doesn’t know who our waitress is but that they will seat us. We get seated then 20 mins pass and no one comes to check up on us, yet they kept going to the table next to us. We were at the point where we wanted to leave when our waitress finally showed up. She took our order and left. At some point my friend accidentally dropped his knife for which when we saw our waitress again I asked her for another knife she never brought it out. Before the bill is brought up I told her hey I wrote on my notes that it’s my friends bday can we please sing him Happy Birthday we didn’t want him to know we wanted them to sing to him but added it to the notes she said oh well they didn’t tell me. She let our friend choose between the dessert. He was given a chocolate slice with ice cream. However when our waitress came she brought the bill and we didn’t have time to give her our voucher for the dessert just the other one we had for 20 off as she was ina hurry. We were charged for the slice. This visit was one of the worst ones we had and I would have understood it if it was super busy but it was...