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| - It distresses me to write this, because for several years Luisa's has been our go-to restaurant for birthdays and the place we brought out-of-town guests. The pizza has been fabulous, the best in Charlotte. So for the pizza, in the past, this would have been a 4- or 5-star review.
However, tonight's visit will be our last. And yes, it was my wife's choice for her birthday celebration, so we drove almost 1/2 hour to get there.
It started the moment we walked in the door. The restaurant was nearly empty; only a couple of tables were occupied. The hostess brought us to a table with two chairs and a corner banquette and said, "is this okay?". My wife, knowing we'd be getting at least two pizzas, said "no, it's really too small for two pizzas." So the hostess put us at the next table, which had no banquette...but the table-top was the exact same size! My wife started to say, 'but that table's still too small', but the hostess simply dropped her menus on the table and walked away without a backwards glance. Now, there were plenty of eight-seater tables empty all around us...it's not like it was a packed house, so they certainly could have let us sit at a larger table. As it was, when the second pizza came out, we had to put it on the table next to us simply because there was no room on ours.
On to the waitress, who brought over a stack of plates, napkins and utensils and put them on the table, where the utensils promptly slid off. Not a big deal, just loud when they hit the pizza stand.
We started with our usual, the big salad, which is a salad that's big enough for all four of us to share. (Although, as it happened, my son's pasta dinner also came with a salad, but it was me who had to ask the waitress if he got one, since she didn't mention it.) We asked for a couple of different dressings, since we were splitting the salad three ways and one cup of dressing isn't enough for all that salad anyway. Turns out they charged us $.50 extra for the second dressing! Now, we've been there many times before and ordered as many as four different dressings, and never been charged extra. How cheap can you be, Luisa's? That salad's way too big for one cup of dressing. The salad, by the way, didn't come with any serving utensils; we had to ask for them. And the lettuce was brown in places.
The two pizzas arrived. The $20 eggplant specialty pizza had very little eggplant on it, and what was there was in big huge chunks rather than nice thin slices. But the pizzas are good at Luisa's, can't take that away from them...although that eggplant one has been better in the past.
My son's pasta came swimming in sauce, which was annoying since my wife had asked specifically for sauce on the side. But he didn't want me to send it back because he was hungry and didn't want to wait longer.
We were surprised when the bill came, although the charges were correct they sure do add up fast! And of course monetarily that $.50 for 'extra' sauce wasn't a big deal...but it sure did rub the wrong way. So my wife went to the guy at the cash register and said, you know, charging me $.50 for extra salad dressing is enough to make me not come back here' to which he replied in a bored and sarcastic voice, 'is it?'. VERY rude and with absolutely no interest in righting a problem. I didn't hear this exchange because I was at the table counting out some money, but when my wife told me about the conversation when we got out to the car, I went back in and asked the guy...who, by the way, was the manager!...if they'd undergone a management change lately, he said no. I said, well, things seem to have changed, and he said in what way, and I said, well, for one thing, the salad was brown, and he said 'was it?' in the same bored tone he used with my wife.
Sadly, Luisa's seems to be on a slide downhill. I hate to see it happen, but when management simply doesn't care about quality service and customer relations, and is cheap enough to nickel and dime you for salad dressing, the writing's on the wall.
With Libretto's right across the street, I think we'll be heading over there for future pizza outings.
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