Came here for dinner for a friend's birthday and was extremely disappointed and would NOT recommend anyone come to this wannabe upscale restaurant.
So to start with we had 13 people and were forced to have the party menu which hardly had any selection and most likely contained items that were most easy to cook. Apparently their policy was that any tables over 12 people MUST have a party menu even though we insisted that we wanted to use the regular menu. Well guess what, half way through our meal there was another large table with 13 (I made sure I counted) who I guess had greater preference than us who all received the regular menu!
Next complaint was their forcefullness to upsell. There was 1 section of the table that ordered a bottle of wine, and in my section we ordered individual drinks so I didn't want a wine bottle. The waitress kept asking "Are you sure you don't want a bottle of wine?" I'm thinking in my head "Hello we all have drinks here already". Ask once and it's enough! To put it even worst some of my friends were drinking tap water and everytime we would ask her to refill our water she would ask "Do you want Sparkling Water?". The waitress asked my friend 4 times!! Come on 2 times might be okay but 4 times?!?
The best part of the meal was probably the antipasto appetizer which contained cold cuts, cheeses, breads, etc. The calamari was awful and had a bad fishy taste in it. I ordered the Chicken Garganelli and it tasted like it was burnt. My friend who got suckered into getting the Brocollini said it was horrible and extremely salty. He was only able to eat a few branches. Worst of all, the waitress NEVER ONCE came back to ask how the appetizers or main course was and didn't even offer to put pepper/cheese on our food.
Okay so I thought okay nothing else bad can happen. I'll just never come here to eat again. But wait, there's more when our group paid the bill. So our group was autocharged an 18% tip which is normal for groups over 6. I was like yeah they totally don't deserve the 18% tip but whatever. When I was adding the bill up, the HST wasn't adding up correctly. I then figured out that they tried to charge HST on the gratuity amount. Now WHAT RESTAURANT CHARGES HST ON GRATUITIES?? So I talked to the waitress saying that charging HST on Gratuity is absurd. So finally she was like "you know what.. FINE i'll just take it out of my own cash" and slammed the counter when we were paying and gave total attitude. Okay if the restaurant was great, I'd let it go and I wouldn't complain about the extra HST they charged but after such a poor experience I DO NOT want to give them anymore that shoudn't have been given to them.