Ulivo Restaurant — Restaurant in San Diego

What a wonderful surprise and absolutely delicious meals.

My wife and I enjoyed a local Saturday night dinner date together at a restaurant we have not tried before and what a fantastic dining experience it was. Ulivo’s menu is authentic Italian with wonderful Mediterranean seafood options; the special of the day was a seafood pasta that was nothing short of extraordinarily delicious. My wife Brennen chose the seafood pasta special with the white wine sauce and the dish arrived with a generous assortment of shellfish served over a very light linguini pasta. Super fresh and delicious.

Our Server, Robert, who was delightfully informative of the specials, also shared one of his favorite adaptions of my favorite meal, Pollo Parmigiana. His favorite and now mine, this “must ask for” version of Pollo Parmigiana was served with tender lightly breaded pieces of chicken over a bed of creamy Fettucine Alfredo. The fresh mozzarella melted over top the chicken dressed with a very light marina sauce, is as traditional as it gets. The blend of the white and red sauces was perfect. This wonderful meal came with an assortment of fresh vegetables slices, zucchini, peppers, and broccoli. It was so surprisingly delicious I had to stop in the middle of the meal and take this photo to share.

We chose to share a desert, which was outstanding, but you be the judge. I do recommend you save some room to try the bread pudding or a cannoli.

An almost perfect meal. My only regret is that we did not try this best kept secret restaurant sooner.

Thank you for a very enjoyable evening, we’ll...

Ulivo had great reviews. We made a reservation. Arrived the ambiance was nice. It was overly warm. Most of the tables were occupied. Ordered wine and an appetizer and water. The appetizer was very salty and we were unable to finish it and drank all the water provided. We ordered more wine, a beer, and more water. The wine and beer (can) were delayed because there were no clean wine glasses Our entrees took ~20 minutes to come out. We set the entrees on the table the server spilled the sauce from one of the entrees onto 2 of us, into our wine and all over the table. He commented about the fullness of the dish and the extra goodness the kitchen had put into it, but did not clean what he spilled or even over extra napkins, so that we could clean ourselves and the table. As for the entrees none of us finished them as they were also overly salty and not balanced, very acidic. The eggplant was very thin and heavily breaded. The vegetables were slightly warm, but not cooked. We sat for most if meal with empty water glasses as our server barely paid any attention to his tables.

This was possibly the worst combination of poor service and displeasing food that we have ever...

Made a dinner reservation for Valentines a week before. Got contacted the day before Valentines to say they overbooked and needed to move our reservation to 7:30. Showed up at 7:25 and was told by the waitress that the wait would take about 10 minutes and we said that was totally fine. There was no space to wait inside so we asked if she could call us when the table was ready while we wait in the car and she said she would. We ended up never getting a call and walked back in at 7:55 as she's seating some other people at a booth. She apparently forgot about us and asked if we would be okay sitting at the window seats... We made a reservation, what's the point of making a reservation to sit at stools in the window where everyone walks by. She said if we wanted a table it would take more time. We were starving and...