| rev:text
| - Winterlicious baby! Love the location, decor and atmosphere. Very happy with the house wines, though frankly the wine menu is generally beyond my budget. And the food overall is honestly as good as you'd want it to be, so I'll get that out of the way early because it really is the most important thing in my opinion.
Pulcinella came very highly recommended by a friend. It's relatively new to the area but has already established itself well from what I gather. I just wish the overall experience had lived up to the hype. Two "areas for improvement".
First, the table we were seated at was quite near the kitchen and tilted diagonally to fill an awkward space around a support column. Not even remotely a dealbreaker, but disappointing (especially since the wait staff were back and forth right behind us all night and the kitchen was pretty loud -- seemed like they were having fun back there). We didn't complain, even though we'd had the reservation made for two weeks and probably were entitled to a quieter table. (There were some available, had we asked, but by that same measure, why couldn't we have had one of those tables right off the bat?)
Second, our server pretty much phoned it in. He mixed up our first course, made an error on our desserts (then charged us for it even though it was part of the Prix Fixe menu), spilled cracked pepper into my water glass and seemed to be trying to avoid eye contact. It became a bit of a joke how consistently he'd look around the room instead of at our table while placing something down or taking something away. I imagine (hope) it was just a bad habit, but at times I wondered what it meant. Was he uncomfortable? Judgy? Distracted? We'll never know! (And the rest of the staff were great, so maybe it was just this guy.)
As for the food, I had the vitello tonato and the mushroom risotto, with creme brulee to finish. My friend had the octopus terrine with the beef bolognese and gelato. She did remark that the gelato had more of an ice cream consistency, and I found the risotto just a tad heavy on the truffle oil. But on the whole it was delicious, paired very well with their house red wine which I would give ANYTHING to be able to buy at the LCBO. (COME ON PEOPLE GET ON THAT.)
So, I don't think Winterlicious was the best way to experience Pulcinella for the first time. I don't think we saw them at their best, service-wise. I'll certainly give them another go when I can order whatever I like. At the Winterlicious price, it was indeed an excellent experience. At the regular menu prices? Well, I'd probably have asked for a new table. And tipped less than 15%.
4 out of 5 stars, taking into account the value of the Winterlicious price and minus 1 star for the service and 0.125 star for the disruption caused by the proximity of our table to key work areas. (But it's statistically insignificant so I still rounded back up to 4.)
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