Interiano's Pizzeria & Ristorante — Restaurant in Town of Hempstead

One of the worst experiences of my life... sad too, because the food was actually pretty good. Unfortunately, I didn't get to take all of it home with me, and what I did bring home I won't be eating.

The server screwed up our order from the start, and it was a fairly simple order: a chicken roll, mozzarella sticks, spaghetti & meatballs and an order of spaghetti Sicilian. First sign of trouble was the 10 minute wait for two place settings when there were 4 of us. Oh yeah, and that was after we had to grab a menu from another table because, oh, I don't know, why would we need a menu to figure out what we want to eat?

Another sign of trouble was the Valentines decorations still hanging from the ceiling (mind you, we are nearly 2 full weeks past St. Patrick's Day at this point in time!) Then the spaghetti Sicilian comes out alone... well, not really alone I guess... it had two meatballs on it! Interesting... I grab the menu from the other table and check again... nope, no mention of meatballs in the menu! This was my wife's dish and she doesn't eat meat, but trooper she is, she just pulled the meatballs off. We cut them up for our 2 boys, who were supposed to split an order of spaghetti and meatballs. About 5 minutes later I told my wife to start eating without me, and predicted that the waiter wasn't gonna be bringing an order of spaghetti and meatballs. Sure enough another 5 minutes later I was proved right! He thought my wife wanted meatballs with her spaghetti dish. An innocent mistake you might be thinking... except that we explicitly stated we were ordering the spaghetti and meatballs for our two boys to split. Not to mention, if my wife wanted a side of meatballs, why wouldn't you bring it ON THE SIDE?!? Amazingly, he brought out an order of spaghetti & meatball 5 minutes later.

My wife really enjoyed her dinner. (Too bad though because we will NEVER be ordering from there!) We finish eating... there's half of the spaghetti & meatball left over, half of my wife's spaghetti Sicilian and half my chicken roll. The kid finally comes over to check on us after being MIA for about 15 minutes. We tell him we want to wrap up our food. He grabs some empty dishes and the spaghetti & meatball, disappears again for 5 minutes, then comes back empty handed. He asks if we want anything else and I tell him, "No, just please wrap the rest of the food for us and bring the check." He grabs the chicken roll sitting in front of me and throws a bunch of dirty napkins on it! I'm like "Whoa... I told you we want to wrap the food up!" "Oh, you want to wrap the food?" "Yes!" He takes the plates away to wrap them. Now I'm furious... I'm not eating food that had garbage thrown on top of it, literally right in front of me! He comes back with a bag of leftovers and I ask "Is the first dish of spaghetti in there?" He swears that all our leftover food is in there and guess what? Yep, the original spaghetti & meatball dish was not in there! No surprise to me at this point.

There had only been one other occasion before tonight's experience where I didn't leave a tip: when I waited over 2 hours for food that the manager of the restaurant told me was only ordered 30 minutes prior and then the timestamp on the check proved me right!

I don't want to insult the kid's "intelligence" but there was no excuse for the poor service. I worked in the restaurant business from age 14 to age 21. This wasn't a busy Saturday. We ordered basic items off of the menu with no substitutions or special requests. We just wanted some good food after a nice day at the park. At least my wife has some pasta she can eat later tonight, and one son has 4 mozzarella sticks left. The half a chicken roll left that I was hoping to eat tonight went straight in the garbage when I got home, and we never got the rest of the spaghetti & meatballs that my sons didn't finish.

I paid the check at the counter with my credit card, and even that went wrong... the receipt got stuck! I asked if he needed me to sign anything and he thankfully said "no"... obviously not...

I was not happy when a new place came in and took over my favorite pizza joint, but I decided to support it. The staff seemed incredibly friendly at first, wanted to know everyone by name, and even gave me the occasional deal, but as time went on I came to realize, that for the quality and amount of food I was getting, the price really wasn’t worth it, so I just started going there for pizza. That all changed however when I was out driving one day. The friendly owner who called me by my name, was speeding, went right through a stop sign, and almost hit me. I honked and he stopped, hung out the window and cursed me out good. He didn’t even seem to recognize that I had been a regular in his store going on two years, and that’s when I realized that was his true personality, and the friendly entrepreneur I had come to know was all for show. I haven’t...

Handwritten sign says 11:30 am open time (though the printed open time says 11:00). The person who opened the door said they needed another 10 minutes (pushing the time to 11:40). Not that great a start. However, the pizza was really good and made fresh!

The owner was very kind and brought the pizza to my table. I was only there for lunch while I waited for my dentist around the corner. It's not a bad place. It's probably good for just a casual lunch, though, as a pizzeria it's nicer than what you may find in the five boroughs for example. Take that...