Lauren O.
Yelp
While Caruso's may have delicious food and an authentic "old country" ambiance, the staff's ability to effectively handle the busy holiday catering crowd was atrocious. My family ordered several trays of pasta, chicken, and eggplant from the store several days before Christmas. We were told to pick up our order on Christmas Eve at noon. At 1pm my mother arrived to find a line of patrons picking up orders confined to an outdoor tent (it was 35 degrees). The orders were not ready yet, so the small store could not accommodate all of these people inside. I understand that it is a very busy time of year, but Caruso's took far more orders than they were equipped to handle. (No apologies, discounts, or even a free "extra" was offered to anyone) When my mother was finally waited on, the woman, first, could not find her order, and then, gave her an order that was both incorrect and incomplete (because of the crowd and the staff's curt nature, this was not discovered until my mother had returned home).
I returned to the store with my mother and, again, had to wait in a long line of unhappy customers. 5 or 6 other patrons were grumbling about incomplete orders or having to wait long past their assigned pick-up time. The staff member who corrected our order acted slightly annoyed and sloppily packed the several containers of chicken and eggplant that were originally missing. It is worth noting that Caruso's will not give you an itemized receipt, so it makes any discrepancy you might have with your order quite difficult. On Christmas Day, when we unpacked and reheated the food, we found that ALL of the dishes had been sloppily packed (sauce dumped onto pasta, not mixed... and chicken parmigiana squished into too-small containers with the ends of the chicken cut off to make the cutlets fit). It was obvious that the staff was not prepared to deal with the number of patrons they promised to accommodate, so their preparation of the food was careless and their customer service left much to be desired. It is a shame that Caruso's didn't stop taking Christmas orders when they knew they were saturated and, instead of trying to make more money, focus on actually earning the money they'd already been given.