Brelundi — Restaurant in Waltham

The front of the house service is very attentive, warm, and polite here, which is refreshing. Brelundi restaurant is a full service restaurant serving breakfast, lunch and dinner. They offer both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages such as wine, and imported sparkling mineral water. They will offer you bread. They are making house cured mortadella, etc, which really impressed me. I enjoyed their eggplant Caponata on their anti-pasti plate, whose sauce is sweet with golden raisins, and their buttery proscuitto. The eggplant is cubed and braised in the marinara sauce as is traditional. They served kalamata and large green ( Spanish ? Pitted olives with the Antipasto. They served the Antipasto with fried chick pea flat bread whose name eludes me - Crespelle ? It has a nice, nutty flavor though was a teeny bit greasy.

They sell imported pastas. The restaurant pretty much aims to make diners feel welcome as in complimentary dishes used to be sent out to diners frequently, which I know for a non-Italian might be a difficult concept to comprehend. This is the cultural practice of "abbondanza. " A family place. My entire immediate family save myself ate here once and had a fun time. ( I was invited but was trying to heal a rift so didn't attend. Our family tradition & kind practice of the silent treatment continued with gusto. :_)

Reportedly, my immediate family enjoyed the Arancini on that visit but were completely confused by the executed practice of Abbondanza at Brelundi restaurant that evening. They told me that I missed a good time.

Not to fret ! I returned with my sibling and had pizza, and she had the soup, which she likes.

My immediate family still pigged out on the free Tiramisu and other complimentary desserts that were generously sent their way that evening, so no worries there. It's my opinion, but not necessarily creed, that gift horses shouldn't be looked in the mouth. I think now post pandemic and with steeply inflationary times the generous free desserts at Brelundi became a bygone luxury.

The restaurant has a patio and patio dining in warm weather. They now serve breakfast. Their pizza is good. The restaurant is located next to the Waltham Watch Factory Museum on the Charles River in Waltham, in the actual old Waltham Watch building, which is an enormous, long, sturdy, renovated and repaired red brick factory warehouse building which incidentally rents large converted studio Condominiums. Diners can stroll on the beautiful Charles River way and even out on the dock all the way to The Cove park in Auberndale, MA. Pretty dogwoods and apple trees...

I have dined here about a half dozen times. The food is great. The service is not. I was surprised to hear that anyone had good service here because I consistently have had slow, inattentive or down right rude service here. We go back because it's convenient and we work very close by, but our last experience we stood for more than 8 minutes waiting to be acknowledged, the server who finally came over was downright rude. We saw her drop things from someone's table and kick those things across the room. We finally got seated and waited another 15 minutes for someone to come to the table. Their patio had people out there but there was no one inside but it looked like they had only 2 servers working. Our sandwiches did not come with any pasta salad or anything on the side like they used to and our table was missing the two non-alcoholic beverages that were ordered until half way through the meal. My advice is to try Brelundi, perhaps you will have a different experience than we have had. If you like Italian food, the food is worth the wait. The bread is delicious, the pasta and sandwiches and salads are great. Just be aware that your service may be extremely slow, they will forget items and may be rude to you. Also, any time we have gone (at lunch time) I was berated and not seated for not having a reservation so I now make sure I call and make reservations before attempting to go there or we...

I dined at Brelundi with my family of four and none of us were entirely satisfied with our meals. My brother's tortellini dish was at least 60% sauce and spinach and the whole meal tasted as if it been microwaved. The same goes for my father's food. I ordered the vegetarian pizza and upon seeing it I immediately thought it looked sloppy. The toppings looked like they had been carelessly thrown on, yet I must say the dish did taste great. My mom and brother each tried a slice and said it was much better than their rather disappointing meals. I especially loved the peppers and ricotta cheese on it. The strawberry mocktail I drank was also quite good; probably my favorite part of the meal. My mother was the one who most disliked the dinner. She ordered a salad and barely ate any of it. I tried one of the croutons and not only did it feel stale but the taste was also rather strange. My brother tried the salad and agreed that the dressing was horrid. "It tasted like soap," he told me. We later mentioned this to the server and she said it was lemon dressing. I will applaud the waiters for being very welcoming and patient, though. We were considering getting dessert since we heard good things about the cannoli donuts from Phantom Gourmet, but decided not to because one of the workers told us that the desserts are frozen and warmed up. Overall, Brelundi was nowhere near as impressive as we...