Drew K.
Yelp
We were excited to change things up and try the highly touted Avo for some Italian food while in New Orleans last weekend, but the meal was an overall disappointment.
The interior is intimate and warm, perfect for a date night bite, or 4 friends grabbing a meal. Based on earlier reviews, it looks like they recently renovated and I can confirm everything looked nice enough.
The menu offers 6 or so appetizers, 6 or so pastas, and 4 protein forward mains.
(Appetizers $13-$18, Pastas $25-$32, and Entrees $29-$60 per dish FYI)
We started with the crispy calamari and the fried eggplant as appetizers. The eggplant was very good, but the calamari was the start of our troubles. It was extremely salty. I love salt. My wife loves salt. We have salt problems when snacking, and we both couldn't eat more than one bite, it was that salty. Burn your mouth salty. All 4 of us at the table agreed that the dish was too salty, but we just chalked it up as an accidental heavy hand with salting it coming out of the fryer, and like the eggplant, everything else will be great.
My wife ordered the Rigatoni, I ordered the Cacio E Pepe, another table mate ordered the Chicken Picatta, and I've already forgotten what the 4th ordered.
I was very excited for the Cacio E Pepe. It's one of my favorite Roman dishes, and something I often jump on when I find it on a menu. I spun up a big forkful, popped it in my mouth, and there was that salt again. I chewed through it, tried another big spin of noodles, and yup wayyyyy too salty. It tasted as if someone thought it would be fun to prank our table, not just one dash too many, but a pile of salt.
I looked over at my wife, and she had taken one bite of her food and stopped eating altogether. Same problem.
The other tablemate who ordered the chicken, also felt it was too salty to her taste but not as bad as mine nor my wife's.
(We started tasting each others dishes it was so weirdly salty, that I wanted to double check I wasn't just making this up in my head)
After my two big spins of my noodles and sharing a bite to others at the table, it looked like I didn't have an issue with my plate since it was half gone... So, I let the server know the best I could that this was inedible salty, but I obviously pointed out that I had made a big dent in it so I wasn't asking for free food on the check or anything. I also pointed out that my wife's almost completely untouched plate was also too salty, and mentioned the other salty dishes we had run across along the way. I was trying to share a serious concern, and just looking at my wife's one bite and done plate, it should have been obvious something was wrong.
Our server more or less just said "thanks for the feedback, I'll let them know", and that was that. There wasn't much of an attempt to fix the night from management, or the kitchen, and essentially no one acknowledging our issue after that.
There were some mistaken drink orders, and other weird service blunders, but I'm sure we were just hyper aware of stuff since we were already irked about dinner going so poorly. Our only specific complaint about the service was at the end of the night with the bill. Our friend offered to get the whole check, and the server handed her the card reader tableside and told her she went ahead and put 20% tip on the bill, and then hovered over her to watch her accept and sign. That just struck us as uncomfortably pushy, and after everything else going so poorly that night (and lack of anyone addressing it) it was just the last straw.
Overall, man I hope this was just a weird terrible one off night for them, but with the amount of good food and front of house available around town, I doubt I'll make a point to come back to find out.