Giuseppe's Cucina Rustica — Restaurant in San Luis Obispo

Horrible. Racist. Terrible Service and environment. I would not recommend this place to any person of color visiting San Luis Obispo. I visited this restaurant expecting a nice dinner with my partner before Thanksgiving. Firstly, since it is so inconvenient that this restaurant will not accept any reservations ahead of time, my guest and I were forced to wait over an hour and a half to be seated (keep in mind, there were only two of us). However, I heard so many great things about this restaurant I was willing to wait. After about an hour my partner went to ask how many people were ahead of us on the waiting list. We are both Latinos and college students, so are visibly young. Based on our own identities we feel as though the service provided was discriminatory and unfair. The hostess notified him that we only had two people in front of us. We waited another THIRTY MINUTES before my guest approached the hostess again, only to be ignored. I approached them and noticed on their seating sheet, people who came in after us and who had their name under ours were already seated. The hostess looked around and sat us at a large table with only us two, so we were quite far from each other, which already affected the mood. Our server however was the worst part of the night. If I could share a name I would, however he did not even have the etiquette to introduce himself. I understand it was a busy night, however as someone who has experience in serving, it is your job to make customers feel welcomed and valued. My boyfriend and I felt neither. He seemed rather annoyed by our questions, especially when we tried to ask him multiple times what nonalcoholic beverages they offered. When we finally placed our orders he did not visit our table again at all. THE ENTIRE NIGHT. Meanwhile, some ladies who were right next to us were given quality service by him, they shared a laugh, conversation, and constant service, because they were Caucasian. My boyfriend and I were the only guests we noticed in the restaurant of color and felt as though our experience was awful due to this fact. I would like to note our bus boy offered us much better service compared to our waiter. We waited 40 minutes for both our meals which were not even give to us by our waiter. My food was quite cold, I ordered the dinner lasagna, and my boyfriend ordered the chicken and mashed potaoes, which was not very flavorful and lacked seasoning. Our waiter had not visited our table a single time after taking our order and that remained until I had to wave him down for the check and waited another 10 minutes just to pay, while our waiter was chatting with the hostesses and who I can only assume was the manager. He also had a very rude attitude towards me when asking if I should pay elsewhere after he gave me the check (since it was my first visit and he was taking a very long time to take my card to pay). We left without a word after he finally processed my payment, unsatisfied and disrespected. I would think somewhere given such high praise in a college town like SLO would be welcoming to all people, ESPECIALLY its students, however, obviously Giuseppe's is an exception. I hope this is a helpful review for any of my fellow Latinos, or POC for that matter, who plan on going somewhere for Italian food, as I would only hope that no one else is faced with that kind of discrimination and...

Service started strong and declined as time went on. Ultimately ended up leaving frustrated.

Water and drinks were staying topped off till about 60% into the meal and then it kinda stopped.

Menu special for the day was sea bass on a Monday, smelled fishy. I'm assuming they didn't sell through it on the weekend service and thats why it ended up on the menu.

Our appetizer came out followed by our entrees not more than 1 or 2 minutes. That was also poor form and kind of defeated the pacing of the meal. Odd but whatever.

We had ordered dessert, Gelato, carrot cake and cannoli. Took 15-20 minutes for it to come out. We asked twice, one of them I firmly mentioned its taking to long and we are tight on time. Our party of 5 was sitting there idle with no food on the table that entire time and our drinks ran low.

As far as I know, none of the desserts came off the check. I don't mind paying the posted prices but when it takes that long for dessert to come out, the social contract is broken and it ends up the restaurant literally stealing time away from me and multiplied by 5 and that irritates me to no end and is a party foul.

Lastly, after dessert, since our table was cleared we had 2 or 3 dishes delivered to our table that were intended for other tables. This reflected poorly on service.

I don't need an apology or an explanation on why the dessert ticket had a hiccup. I need my time back or a refund on an error that was caused on your end and as far as i know we got neither. That delay caused our party to rush and took away time from our itinerary afterwards.

Had the desserts come out promptly, I would have been willing to overlook the other short comings but steal time from me and well here I am. I will not be giving the restaurant another chance as that was their chance. If your service starts to waiver, I would strongly urge you to start taking matters in your own hands and being...

We were so excited to eat at this restaurant last night in SLO. Had a party of 5 with no reservation but only had to wait 45min to be seated on a Saturday night. (Usually at least 2hrs so we got lucky) We ordered drinks and our food right away. 50min later I finally received my side salad. Our glasses sat empty and our server avoided us for another 45min. We asked our server about the delay and she stated the salad I ordered was considered an appetizer so we should have stated that we wanted our entire order out at the same time otherwise the other 4 people in our party had to wait while I ate my salad. We watched as 4 other tables around us were seated, ate their food, and left during our almost 2hr wait. Our food finally came out however one of our daughter’s order never arrived to the table. We asked the server about it, she stated she thought our other teenagers were sharing their plates with her since they all ordered pizza. We were frustrated and disappointed and didn’t want to wait for an additional order to be made so we asked for our check.

We stepped inside to speak with the gentleman who claimed to be the manager. He was very unapologetic and accused us of exaggerating the wait time. He offered to put in the order for my daughters missing meal but otherwise stated “it’s our first night reopening, so you should have expected to wait”. He argued with us for 10min before storming away. Busy nights and misplaced orders happen in every restaurant, but bad service is unacceptable. Especially for a higher end restaurant in a well established area. We will not be returning and encourage the management to reconsider how they speak to their guests. An apology would have been great but we never...