Osteria Antica Bologna

I read all the reviews about this restaurant and ignored them. I ignored them firstly, because about six months ago I enjoyed a superb seafood pasta here on a sunny Saturday, and second, because it is about 300 metres from my house. And a damn good thing it was to ignore those reviews.

Okay, okay, the service did still have a few holes in it – they forgot to bring us bread. But if you are going to restaurants for the bread alone, you are either a baker or an idiot. For the most part, waiting staff were attentive and friendly.

We shared an entrée, a sort of vegetarian lasagne of tomato, eggplant and mozzarella. Not quite as hot as it might have been, but certainly not lacking in flavour and well presented.

We went for seafood main courses, possibly to reignite the memories of past seaside meals in Italy. To be honest, our two dishes were at least the equal of any seafood we’ve eaten on an Italian coastline. Monkfish wrapped in crispy bacon was decently sized, moist and flavoursome, whilst the swordfish steak stuffed with spinach was outstanding.

As a couple on a Wednesday night, we faced the dilemma of either a glass of wine each or slugging our way through a whole bottle. It’s not a problem at this restaurant, as they have a selection of wines available in 500ml carafes – we had a terrific lightweight red.

All in all, this was a restaurant well worth visiting.
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Mango - View all reviews by this user
Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Having been a couple of times before I thought this restaurant would be a good venue for a birthday meal, but sadly not. Although the food was nice, the service was terrible and it seemed like a real cheek to still have 12.5% automatically added to our bill. Free tea and coffee was the only compensation we got for waiting probably an hour for our main courses.
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Alison
Thursday, September 22, 2005