As a native Madisonian I consider Porta Bella one of the cornerstone restaurants of city. It has been around forever and is part of the unique flavor of downtown. It has a really nice ambience and i used to enjoy going there in years past. That's why I was extremely disappointed with my recent experience dining there. Basically the rating I've given is for a tasty salad & entree and mediocre dessert. The reason the rating is so low is because the service was HORRIBLE. We were seated promptly and from there the service went totally downhill. Our waitress was friendly but COMPLETELY clueless. What should have been a one-hour meal took THREE HOURS. The service was incredibly slow and the waitress put one of the entrees in completely wrong so the order had to be put in over again and one person had to wait for their food. But amazingly that didn't slow the dinner down as much as the waiting between courses. Our waitress clearly had no idea how to stay in touch with her tables, she disappeared for long periods of time. She would take simple requests for more water and would vanish for more than 10-15 minutes at a time. I would have thought this was a problem with the kitchen but just from watching our waitress i think the problem was her & not so much the kitchen. Although she was eventually apologetic about the wait I think she really was undertrained for her job and possibly the dumbest wait person I've ever encountered. She was friendly but just had no idea how to do things. It was pretty shocking. The service took so agonizingly long it was hard to enjoy the food, which was fairly good but didn't really blow our socks off. Overall, a very disappointing experience, especially since I consider Porta Bella a city landmark. I'm planning on contacting the management, which is something I've NEVER done before but I was THAT appalled by how bad our waitress was.