Sorellina — Restaurant in Traverse City

I'm writing this review late- several months after my party dined at Sorrelina. First off, I hate writing bad reviews for restaurants because I like to give establishments the benefit of the doubt. However, our experience was so terrible that three months later, I'm still disgusted by how we were treated at Sorrelina. We were in town for a bachelorette weekend. Mind you, this is a second marriage for my friend so it's not like we were a group of wild 20 somethings acting a fool. We were a group of 8 (successful) women, early 40's. All that we were looking for was a fancier restaurant where we could dress up and eat a delicious meal. From the moment we sat down, our experience went from bad to worse. We had a reservation so we were promptly seated and our waitress arrived almost immediately. We ordered our drinks, then proceeded to wait almost forty minutes for our drinks to arrive. When we inquired on our drinks, our waitress informed us that "the system had crashed" which what had caused the delay. We were agreeable, and our drinks slowly arrived. Shortly after, we ordered appetizers (bread) and our dinner. Another forty minutes passes, we still do not have our appetizer. Again, we were flexible. Nearly every woman at the table had waitressed/bartended at some point in our lives so we're typically an easy table to take care of. Appetizers finally arrived and were decent. We ordered second drinks (lengthy wait for those as well) and waited patiently for our dinners. Long story short, we waited almost 2 hours for our dinners to arrive. At this point, we're slightly irritated. The manager popped over to our table and one of our group members asked why everything was taking so long. The manager informed us at that time that 1. there had been no system crash, therefore no reason for our initial drinks to take 40 minutes 2. we were being impatient which they found unacceptable. Eventually, our food arrives. More than half of it was cold and incorrect. The manager returns and she's visibly frazzled. Our "spokesperson" explains how poor our experience has been. She even goes as far as to mention that many of us have worked in the food industry in the past so we're typically the last to ever complain. The manager kindly lets us know that she's worked in the industry far longer (not sure why that even needed to be said). None of our food issues were corrected. At this point, we're just trying to eat and get the heck out of there. The manager then returns to our table, angrily accusing us of "getting in the waitresses face" She tells us that she doesn't appreciate our behavior or the way that we were treating staff. She even went as far as accusing one of the women at our table of standing up and "getting up and intimidating our waitress" Under no circumstances were we ever as much as rude to the staff. No one stood (except to use the bathroom). She told us that she didn't appreciate our intimidating behavior. We all sat, stunned, as this was complete fiction. We told her to go back and look at security footage and she could see for herself that nothing of the sort happened. She ROLLED HER EYES and walked away. They then delivered complimentary desserts that no one asked for, and went mostly untouched. We proceeded to sit for an additional 30 minutes after asking for our bills so that we could finally put an end to the disastrous dinner. When the manager finally came back to our table with our bills, she told us that we were being "ungrateful" because discounting food "takes time" and THREW THE BILLS AT US. THREW THEM!!!!! We never asked for the complimentary desserts. We never asked for our bills to be discounted. We simply wanted to get out of that restaurant.

We paid our bills and left, but the sour taste of Sorellina is still with me, three months later. We dined in the restaurant Saturday, October 7, 2023 @ 7pm. As for our "intimidating" group, not a single woman in our party stands at over 5'5. The only thing that this manager found "intimidating" was the color of some of our groups...

Today we had such an unfortunate experience at Sorellina Italian Restaurant in Downtown Traverse City, Michigan.

Let me first preface this review by saying that Traverse City is my family and I’s happy place. We come up here multiple times a year and always make it a point to visit Sorellina. Over the past 10+ years, it has been our absolute favorite restaurant. We are always raving about it, so this year my wife and I decided to take my in-laws for the first time. We also brought our two small children.

We made a reservation earlier that afternoon for 6:30pm. My FIL called and spoke to a gentleman on the phone and then got a text message confirmation of the reservation.

We arrived and they said that they didn’t have our reservation under Sam, but asked if it could be under Allison and he said yea it could have been, because that is my daughter’s name, so they sat us at this booth in the back, so we think nothing of it.

An hour later, we get approached by a Manager (Leslie Cole). She asked us if we had a reservation, we said yes, and then she proceeds to walk back up to the hostess stand (no pleasantries). She comes back and basically accuses us of falsifying our reservation to get this table. We give her the details of our reservation and she tells us that some other woman named Allison had the table reserved for 7:30pm. This manager was the rudest person that we have ever encountered in customer service.

First off, if the hostess would have given us a last name, we would have said that isn’t us. Also, why would we show up an hour early for our reservation, so that should have alerted them to maybe there might be a mix up. We would never intentionally steal someone’s reservation and to be accused of such a thing really upset us.

Secondly, they must have disclosed to the 7:30pm table that we stole their reservation. So during our meal, we had a woman and a man come over and make derogatory comments to us in front of our two young children (called us pieces of garbage, etc). This was beyond a classless thing to do over a dinner reservation, but that is beside the point. They should have never been told something that wasn’t true in the first place.

The manager never returned and avoided us the rest of the night. I understand that the restaurant had an upset table at 7:30pm, but because of how they handled it, they now have two upset tables. Not only did they ruin our meal and our night, but they caused us to end our family vacation on a terrible note.

We won’t be back and that is unfortunate, as we lost our favorite restaurant in TC and that this whole situation could have been avoided and handled so much better.

I feel like I need to say that our waitress was great even though she was probably put in the middle of an...

We came here to celebrate a birthday dinner with a party of 4. We had a 30 minute wait which wasn't bad considering it was Saturday evening around 6.

We were seated and greeted within the first 5 minutes by our waitress. The atmosphere was great but that was the only pleasing part of our experience.

It took nearly 30 minutes to get our drink order as our waitress was MIA. We finally got our drinks and throughout the rest of the nearly 3 hours we were there, were only offered one more attempt at getting refills or additional drinks.

We finished our drinks and our order was still not taken. Fast forward another 30 minutes, we finally get to place our order. It was like we were purposely not being waited on - as the table of older couples right next to us had their every want and need attended to by the same waitress.

When our waitress would stop by, it'd be less than 5-10 seconds and she'd be gone for another 20-30 minutes. Finally our food comes. I had the Chicken Marsala and it was pretty good. My wife's dish looked like it had enough food for a small child - literally 5 bites later and it was gone.

So, here we sit again. Food has been eaten, drinks are empty and not a waitress in sight. Once again we don't see her for another 30 minutes. All I wanted to do was pay and get the hell out of here and end this terrible experience. Even that was difficult to do. 😂

It took us another 20 minutes to be cashed out and eventually leave. Reading the reviews, it's like you either have a phenomenal night or a night like ours. I honestly wouldn't take the gamble, there's far better dining experiences in this town.

Without a doubt this was the top 3 worst service I've ever had at a restaurant. Oh, and the table next to us got their birthday treat, did I get mine? I'm sure you guessed right - a solid no.

I'll never eat here again and I recommend you...