Osteria Stecca

I have very mixed views of this place...

A warm greeting, and service started off well, the menu looked good, the wine list looked good.

I ordered half a bottle of the Gavi, the special antipasti of crab salad, and cottoletta for main.

The Gavi arrived, at £20 for a half bottle it was disappointing, it ought to have been closer to the £11 mark for a half bottle.

The bread was very average, the olive oil excellent.

The crab salad was presented well, and the highlight was the (single) prawn. However, the same crab salad clearly was made from tinned crab from the aisles of your local supermarket. Conversely, the salad leaves and tomatoes were fresh, crisp and tasty albeit spoilt by being doused in oil.

My wine was kept aside in a cooling bucket, and not poured at the correct times, service, which started so well, began to slip.

My main course of Cottoletta Milanese, was huge, far bigger than anticipated, a large veal chop on the bone and what looked to be breaded well.

Upon tasting it my excitement died, it was clearly not breaded well, it was clearly fried in some sort of oil as opposed to clarified butter as a Cottoletta ought to be...

The batter looked crisp, but in reality was soggy and did not hold to the Veal chop at all. I asked for salt, and although I was faced with no antagonism, the fact that it was not on the table just screams pretension to me. I was quickly presented with mills of salt and pepper to grind at my will, Maldon and pink, however, the salt and pepper was not.

I asked the waitress 'which would you recommend, the tiramasu or the apple cake'

the reply forthcoming 'it depends which you like'

(thinking to myself here, if I did not 'like' both, then why would I question both... I'm more than aware of what a tiramasu and an apple cake are..."

the waitress continued ' do you like sweet and spicy'

I replied 'yes'

only to notice that by the time I looked up the same waitress had disappears.

I was left to wonder, which pudding I would be presented with...

I was later presented with an undercooked, plain, cake, with baby's apple puree underneath it, and an extremely spiced chocolate ice-cream.

The bill £70 for one person, I could have eaten in a three Michelin stared restaurant for that...

Don't be fooled by the crisp white table clothes and charming welcome, this is not up to the standards that it aspires to.
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Overall rating
Food 5 | Service 5 | Atmosphere 5 | Value for money 3
Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Me & my partner visited this restaurant last Sunday evening and we had a lovely time.

We will soon be back.
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Jeff
Overall rating
Food 8 | Service 7 | Atmosphere 8 | Value for money 7
Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Something very odd has happened to this once charming and perfectly acceptable trattoria. In the space of the last month it would seem that it has become a parody of a restaurant. The service last night was lamentably slow. The food was in large part inedible (this is no exaggeration) and the ambiance that the place used to have had evaporated completely. While not long ago the air in Osteria Stecca was full of the playful laughter of customers enjoying their meals, it is now thick with angry diners complaining about the almost comically bad food and appallingly slow service.

I would gladly describe my latest dining experience in Osteria Stecca (a restaurant I used to frequent with my wife and friends but will no longer) as Fawlty Towers-esque, but this might encourage those of a morbid disposition to visit just to see how bad it is; and, truly, no one deserves to be put through such an experience.

Where does one begin? My wife and I, accompanied by a friend of ours, arrived for our meal on time, to be told by a jittery-looking waitress that she needed to speak to the manager about our table and could we sit at the bar and have a drink in the meantime? Our table was in fact ready and visible to us, so it was plain that this was either (a) an attempt to take some pressure off the restaurant's hopelessly overwhelmed staff, (b) a bumbling attempt to get us to spend money in the restaurant's ill-appointed bar or (c) both. Be that as it may, our table miraculously became 'available' once our drinks were finished and we were escorted to our table. No bread was served and a wait of almost one hour began. By the time someone came to take our orders, the conviviality of the evening was already being intruded upon by comments about the service.

A brief word, if I may, about the menu. This has changed since our last visit a fortnight or so ago. The dishes are now far less appetising and the prices have been hiked up. I mention this because, in the course of the earlier visit, a convivial waiter had come to our table to have a brief chat; the usual "are you enjoying your meal?" affair. In the course of that chat, he had explained that the restaurant was experiencing an explosion of interest and that they knew that this was down to the fact that the food was good and the prices were too. They would never, he vowed, depart from that golden rule. That waiter, incidentally, was nowhere to be seen last night.

Food and wine were ordered. The wrong bottle of wine was presented. No harm there, in the grand scheme of things. Later, however, after another interminable wait, the real comedy began. My wife's lasagna bore a striking resemblance to a 2 inch-squared cut-out from the sole of a World War I boot that had seen its fair share of the trenches. You may think this could not really be the case, but we are talking here of a 'lasagna' that was one centimetre thick at its deepest, devoid of the slightest moisture, burned to a cinder around the edges and beneath. It was inedible. A complaint about it was greeted with an attempted defence [note to anyone who owns, runs or works in a restaurant; try to remedy things when a complaint is made. Defending what has already displeased a customer will get you nowhere]. Risibly, the defence was "that's what all lasagna looks like". I mean, really.

My friend and I opted for tagliatelle. Again, inedible. The pasta (which the red-faced 'chef' would probably defend as being al dente) was simply uncooked. It swam in a brown gruel-like sauce which smelled and tasted of the socks which would have resided within the lasagna boot mentioned above and was sprinkled with what were meant to be truffles - and probably were, but those that were almost certainly thrown out by someone with taste as being 'a bad batch'.

A further delay of close to one hour had to be endured before the main courses arrived, enlivened by a conversation with those sitting at the adjacent table who, poor souls, had been waiting for over an hour and a half for their food to arrive. One cannot help thinking, during such a delay, of all that this place used to be and of what it has now become. One also looks around the place; and here one notices that we were not alone in our misery. Just about every table seemed to be complaining about something.

The less said about the main courses the better. Suffice it to say that the steak cut a lonely figure in the middle of my plate, unaccompanied by any vegetables and bearing the weight of a rubbery khaki-coloured object which was supposed to be fois but was ... well, who knows what it was but I am hoping not to come down with something today as a result of daring to ingest it.

Only my wife still had the heart to take desert. After a further wait of almost an hour she ordered a fruit mille-feuille. And here, Osteria Stecca really hit the comedy high-notes. The 'mille-feuille' comprised (I jest not) a burned piece of pastry (store-bought and defrosted), onto which a spoonful of cream had been put. Three blueberries sat atop this joke, looking almost embarrassed to have anything to do with it. Honestly, if you were hosting a dinner party you would not, in a million years, have the gumption to present it as a desert, let alone as a mille-feuille.

There you have it, gentle readers. I have spared you the details of items that were simply not available from the menu and the fact that many of the ingredients described in other dishes were not included (and not mentioned by the waiting staff, so one had to 'find them out' rather than making an informed choice). In summary, this place has fallen off the radar as a place to eat, unless you have enemies whom you are required to feed from time to time. It pains me that I will never return - Maida Vale residents are not spoiled for choice on the restaurant front - but I simply could not return to such a travesty.

By way of a post-script, and to be fair, it may be that the main chef was getting married last night, or was ill in hospital. It may be that he drafted in his slightly slower relatives to look after the place in his absence. But even if this is the case, anyone who knows anything about surviving in the service industry would make amends for this. They would know that, instead of making the lives of their customers a little more pleasant for a few hours, they were subjecting them to an ordeal. They would say; "look, I'm really sorry. I stuffed up. Come again and have a meal on the house" or something of that sort. We even invited the manager to make such a gesture when the bill arrived. His reaction? "Let me change the bill for you. I forgot to add the charge for your coffee"!
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Dr DS
Overall rating
Food 0 | Service 0 | Atmosphere 1 | Value for money 0
Thursday, June 26, 2008

5 of us ate here on Saturday night, on the basis that 2 of our wives had eaten here mid-week a few weeks ago, and came back raving about the place.

The layout and the ambience are perfect for a local Italian eatery, and the outside section looked very good. We were greeted by a warm and genuine Italian hello at the door and taken to a nice table in an enclave (we had booked in advance).

I like the way the food is apportioned into ‘set’ menus, with the 4 course choice costing £29 per head (though if you choose a more expensive item there is a surcharge). The first starters were decent, if not world-beaters. Choices ranged from cold veal selection, to an assortment of Italian meats with mozzarella. Second courses were a bit of a let-down, especially my lobster linguini (surcharge £5), which came with tiny bits of lobster still encased in the shell. Apparently this was not how this dish was served when the ladies had it. Biggest gripe of the night was the wait between the second and third courses, which ended up taking well on an hour. By this stage some of us had lost our appetites, and others were nearly too drunk to enjoy the remainder! We had to inquire as to the whereabouts off our meals on 2 occasions. Luckily my beef steak was superb – cannot fault it for quality of meat nor way it was cooked. Again there were complaints that the mains were not the same dish as they were last time, and this was confirmed by the head waiter who told us the menu had changed but the names off dishes had not. Strange.

Deserts were good. Wine (6 bottles between 5 of us, due primarily to 1 hour wait),

Was decently priced and the sommelier was spot on with his recommendations.

Service was very good and entertainingly authentic. The maitre dee took our complaints on board and did his best to make us happier. He took one bottle of wine off the bill, which was a good move. Though some members of the party left underwhelmed, I thought the restaurant was good. My steak and desert were excellent, and I had a great time. If it weren’t for the wait for the mains this would get higher ratings.
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J & Dee
Overall rating
Food 7 | Service 8 | Atmosphere 9 | Value for money 7
Tuesday, June 10, 2008

I went to dine to this fantastic new restaurant in St. John's Wood. I had been told the food was amazing but being myself Italian, I was suspicious: I was wrong. I had a very pleasant experience; the staff was very friendly as the patron the flamboyant Mr Stecca. Food was tasty and hearty and absolutely fresh. Mr Stecca presented our table with homemade “bomboloni” and a yummy selection of grappas. The environment is cool and packed with Italians… although maybe a bit noisy, this is a good sign: Italians love very good Italian food!
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Ginger
Overall rating
Food 8 | Service 6 | Atmosphere 9 | Value for money 8
Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Further to my earlier review, the price of £110.00 also included 3 excellent desserts!
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Susan F
Overall rating
Food 8 | Service 8 | Atmosphere 10 | Value for money 10
Monday, April 21, 2008

We ate in Osteria Stecca, also on Friday night, but unlike your previous reviewer were very satisfied with the standard of food received. We booked a table for 8.00p.m. and stayed until 10.30p.m. Only once in that time did the chef appear on the restaurant floor to greet, presumably old, friends and only later in the evening, after we had ordered our dessert, presumably when the main work in the kitchen was at a lighter pace. As starters we had the lobster salad, crab ravioli and endive, walnut and roquefort salad. All of these were delicious and required no extra seasoning. The lobster salad was not huge, but well worth the £18 for a 2 course meal. The endive salad was pronounced delicious and the crab ravioli although a little fishy (which is not unusual for crab) was very good. Likewise the calves liver, dover sole and veal milanese main courses were generously portioned and a resounding success, although the milanese was (as described on the menu) a veal chop cooked in milanese style, rather than the wafer thin veal schnitzel usually referred to. With an excellent bottle of Terra Franciacorte; a large bottle of sparkling water; campari and orange; plus a glass of prosecco, the bill came to £110 for 3 people. Where else in London can you find such value?

A neighbourhood restaurant to be treasured.
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Susan F.
Overall rating
Food 8 | Service 8 | Atmosphere 10 | Value for money 10
Monday, April 21, 2008

I went to Osteria Stecca for dinner on Friday night. We had the second seating and had to wait 15 minutes for our table in a cramped bar area. Once seated, we had to wait a while to be served and only got bread after getting our appetizers. The restaurant was quite chaotic and service friendly but erratic, but the menu looked good and very reasonable (fixed prices - £18 for 2 courses, £21 for 3 courses and £24 for four courses) so we decided to withold judgement until our food arrived. Unfortunately, the food was average at best - my scallop starter was too salty, my friend's mozzarella antipasto was served as a full ball of mozzarella with no seasoning, my tagliatelle Bolognese wasn't as good as what I make at home. The restaurant was packed with Italians, most of whom seemed to know the chef, but having eaten the food I wonder if they'll be back. The chef seemed to be at the front of the restaurant all evening, maybe he could have done better to spend more time in the kitchen. Osteria Stecca was reviewed to have great promise, but though it's very reasonable I won't be going back.
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Anu Munshi
Overall rating
Food 6 | Service 6 | Atmosphere 6 | Value for money 8
Saturday, April 12, 2008