Adam D.
Yelp
Oh boy. I don't hand out many one star reviews. You've got to really mess up to get one of these from me. And Cafe Castello did just that.
Based solely on the fact that this place is an Italian cafe serving breakfast would have been enough to keep me away. But our friends brought us here for breakfast so we made the most of it.
There's a chalkboard in front of the cafe listing daily specials, except on this particular day, they ran out of at least one of the specials: the blueberry pancakes. Yet, they didn't bother to erase it from the board. And even though they only ran out of blueberries - not pancakes - the cashier didn't offer an alternative berry. Instead, we asked for an alternative, specifically strawberries, and she looked at us as if we were extraterrestrials. They were "out" of strawberries too, but mushy, moldy strawberries came in our "fresh" fruit that barely filled a 10 oz. cup for $4.95.
Then, my friend wanted something with salmon (not sure if it was a special or not) and they didn't have that either. Instead of just saying, "sorry, we're out of that," the same cashier started bashing the owner's lack of inventory management skills while the owner was right there working in the background.
But then I thought the cashier maybe had a legitimate case against her boss after I tried to order a strawberry-pineapple smoothie (also written on a chalkboard), only to be told they were out of pineapple as well. I opted for the strawberry-banana smoothie instead, which tasted like frothy ice with artificial flavoring. I'm convinced the contents of this smoothie included 0% fresh fruit. And for over $4, that's a rip-off. But hey, at least they left out the moldy berries.
A supreme pizza had just come out of the oven. Admittedly, it looked so good, it made me change my order, but somehow, the pizza was cold. The sad part is the owner served it to me on a single paper plate with the grease soaking through on his countertop. Then he put a plastic fork and knife wrapped in a napkin right next to the greasy pizza. So the napkin got covered in grease before I could even use it to wipe my hands. I sent the pizza back to get heated up and when they brought it back to me, it was STILL cold! I literally told the owner his pizza oven might be broken.
After a while, I noticed my friends were still waiting for their food even after I had already finished mine. Normally, I would have waited for everyone to get served, but I didn't want my pizza to get any colder than it already was. We noticed the only other people in the place were eating my friends' sandwiches. When I went to notify the staff, the owner just happened to be the first person I saw. When I told him what happened, he laughed. Apparently, losing money is funny. Because not only did they have to re-do our order, they also served the other table what they had originally ordered on top of what they received by mistake.
When my friends' order finally did arrive (about 40 minutes later), the staff forgot the butter on their breakfast sandwiches.
At one point, I went to go use the men's room to get the grease off my hands, and of course, they were out of paper towels too.
The only thing this place got right was the French toast, eggs and potatoes, but not even these items were anything to write home about.
The bottom line is this place should not be in business. The owner clearly has no idea how to run a restaurant. At no point did he apologize despite having multiple opportunities to do so. All told, we were here for just under an hour when we should have been in and out in under 30 minutes.
