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| - I think this grade is probably too low, but it honestly represents my first experience at DeSano's. If we go back I'm confident it will go up.
The ambiance is not what I expected at all, very minimalist and open with wooden tables and long benches throughout and a stone floor. The focus is on the kitchen which is wide open and the two giant wood-burning ovens. I really liked it. It screamed - it's all about the food. It gets a little loud since there is nothing to absorb the sound, but nothing too bad.
The bar was very limited in beers at the moment, only 3 on tap. Some wines as well.
The service was... interesting. You order at the front and pay right away and they give you an electronic device to let you know when the pizza is ready. Then they deliver the pizza to your table. It was not very crowded despite being a Saturday night when we came in. We ordered and asked how long it would take and they told us 10 minutes or so. So we went to the bar and got drinks and then sat down. Ten minutes became fifteen became twenty, became twenty-five. Finally one of the servers asked us what we had ordered because she noticed us sitting there for so long (again, it wasn't crowded). It turns out that somehow they hadn't made our pizza. They blamed the error on a new employee they were training. Whatever.
To their credit they brought us out some meatballs, tomato sauce and bread to snack on which was very welcome because we were quite hungry at that point. Unfortunately, they rushed our pizza. We ordered a Napoletana pizza with broccoli rabe, mozzarella de bufala and sausage. But it came out undercooked, white across the bottom rather than charred. The pizza itself was good (although I wish I had realized that it was the only pizza on the menu without tomato sauce! that one's on me) and the quality of the ingredients was apparent. I love the sweet/salty sausage contrasted with the bitterness of the broccoli rabe. However, undercooking and rushing the pizza out really compounded their initial mistake of not putting in our order.
Overall I would recommend DeSano's as it offers a quality of pizza that is difficult to find in Charlotte, even though my own personal experience was rather lackluster.
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