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| - Nothing was terribly wrong with the food, but the service really left a bad taste in my mouth.
Upon walking in, we waited for a few minutes at the door. Left ungreeted, we helped ourselves to a table near the windows and waited perhaps up to ten minutes for our menus. No hello's, no let me tell you about the specials, nothing. We ordered minestrone soup, gnocchi with a meatball (which we were charged for, but never received) and chicken parmesan.
I do not mind when service is slow, but dang, here you have to ask for everything. When our meals arrived, we had to ask for silverware and was brought two forks. Gee, thanks for the forks, but how about a knife to cut the chicken and a napkin? So we had to ask for those separately. The meal was supposed to include bread (which we never received without explanation). Later we overheard the waitress tell another table that they were out; however, a table that arrived when we were finishing up seemed to be a friend of the proprietors and DID receive bread. I am not the type to get all worked up about some bread and it's expected that small restaurants will run out of things, but that burned.
We had to ask for boxes and the bill as well and found that we were charged for the meatball that we never got (and were never checked on to inquire about) and no concessions were made for the missing bread. Frustrated, we just left cash and got out of there.
Nothing was wrong with the food. It wasn't better than anything I could have made at home, so perhaps you could get it as take out if you don't want to cook. Because we had a lot of time to observe what was going on in the restaurant in our long waits for menus, boxes and the bill and my time in college as a server, it appeared like the waitress was never trained properly and spent time going to the back for each table's request instead of multitasking by addressing the needs of multiple tables on each trip back into the kitchen and anticipating diner's needs for the basic components of restaurant service.
I hate giving a little local place a bad review, but I just don't think we could go back there after having such a lackluster experience. I'd suggest to skip Mateo's and instead go for the Greek place down the street where you can get the same small family restaurant feel without the bad taste in your mouth about the service.
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