Myself, my girlfriend and a friend went to Da Mario's for the £5 for any pizza or pasta deal they have between 5pm and 7pm mid-week.
As we sat down we felt the decor looked a couple of decades out of date, but didn't mind as long as the food and service was good. However my girlfriend felt that as they kept the front door open and it was an open kitchen, it would have been nice to have some music in the background to try mask the sounds of the city and the cooking. At least the kitchen was spotless.
The waiter took our order and we sat to wait. Given that it is in the centre of Leeds we expected a little price increase over what we'd judge 'standard' prices for Italians, but we felt £4 for a small glass of wine and £14 for a bottle of house wine way too much.
So we tried to ask for water but every time the waiter gave us something (cutlery, pizza etc) he immediately did an about face and walked away as quickly as he could, leaving me with my mouth open saying 'excuse me...'. I can't emphasise enough how rude he came across, I'd never seen anything like it.
My girlfriend managed to get a waiters attention and we asked for water and some black pepper for our pizza.
When the water came over the waiter said 'champagne on ice'. I thought it was a joke (as it wasn't the rude waiter who gave us the water) so I looked up and laughed, but I realised he wasn't actually laughing. By now my friend was really annoyed as he felt a joke had been made at our expense (which in retrospect my girlfriend and I agreed with).
So we finally got to eat our pizza's, which had come out quite quickly and were well cooked. I had a Quattro Salami, though one of the meats was lamb it didn't bother me, and they had vegetarian pizza's. Everyone enjoyed their pizza though I felt mine had way too much oregano, reminding me of takeaway pizzas rather than restaurant pizzas.
We asked for our bill and it came with a 10% 'gratuity' automatically added! By this point we were all really annoyed so I got up and went to pay the bill, asking them to take off the gratuity.
He immediately got annoyed with me, asking me why. I explained that we prefer to add a tip ourselves if we wish as we don't appreciate being forced to add the tip. He asked what we didn't like about the service (which is quite laughable in retrospect) and I told him we felt they'd been very abrupt with us and it was hard to get them to help us.
He interrupted me (!) and ended up just turning away to the other waiter (who until this point I considered the 'rude one') and told him to take off the service charge as we didn't like the service. Then he walked off, we paid the bill and left - never to return!
I'd guess the underlying moral is not to bother going to for the meal deal, as they'll treat you like rubbish. If you go later on in the evening to choose from their overpriced menu they'll probably treat you a little better.
They get one star because the pizza was quite nice, other than that the whole experience was horrible.
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Sep 2nd, 2008
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