Bella Italia South Kensington, Verona's Balcony

An authentic and intimate experience. Sanja served us with a great smile and delivered some exceptional food. While all the food was tasty, the gnocchi starters stuffed with cheese and a side of chilli jam, is the best I have ever had.

Sadly, for such a high rated restaurant, this place was a huge let down. We ended up waiting for more than an hour to be served 2 pizzas which didn’t even taste too good. We went on a Saturday evening, when it was full. The manager was very kind and found us a table, we ordered, got our drinks and started waiting for the food. We saw people that came in after us, had to wait for tables, getting their food and eating it, yet we weren’t getting ours. The table next to us even had some problem with one of their pizzas and got a new one, yet we were still waiting. After an hour of waiting we signaled to the waiter, who didn’t bother to ask us anything for the full hour we were waiting and was moving so much we had to try multiple times to get his attention, he came to us he had the gall ask if we were done. It turns out he had forgotten to put our order in all together, when we told him we didn’t even get our food he acted surprised and went to check on the computer. At this point I was properly pissed off, but he didn’t even come back to apologize, he send the polite manager lady to apologize in his stead and she offered us drinks on the house while we wait for our order to actually be prepared, but we declined. When the pizzas finally came, they weren’t even as good as expected. I ordered the Formaggio pizza and I couldn’t recommend it less. The “tomato” based tasted like cheap sweet ketchup which clashed terribly with the salty cheese. The overly sweet with salty combination was absolutely disastrous and were I not so hungry I probably would not have been able to eat more than a slice. This place proved to by Italian just in name, as what was served would probably offend any real Italian. The nice lady did offer us a 25% off our bill at the end, but they still put a 3£ service charge. Maybe everything being so overpriced would have been ok if the food was any good, but as it was it definitely wasn’t worth the price. What was worse, since there wasn’t much to do while we wait, we were looking around and we saw the waiter take out a bag of trash out the front door, no gloves or anything, then come right back inside and go to the cutlery drawer and start organizing clean forks and knives in their respective place. After that, he took the cheese and grater and grated some cheese on the food for another table. All this with unwashed hands after handling a trash bag. I would have liked to point this out to him, but he was so busy running around that he didn’t pay us any mind for a full hour, apparently he’s also too busy to wash his hands which looks like a health hazard for all the people using the cutlery or having cheese grated on top of their pasta by him. The only reasons this isn’t 1 star is because the lady did really try to make it up to us in the end but it was sadly too late.

The food is not bad, but the service is terrible. We wait for 20 minutes to place the order. The waiter is not happy with our request to split the bill. It seems only two staff manage two floors’s tables. The management should allocate more capacity to avoid the staff serving with anger.