Brandon P.
Yelp
Bottom line: food is great, the wine phenomenal, but the service doesn't reflect those elements of dinner here.
I loved the food elements of my meal at Ciro. The food has clearly high quality ingredients, and the wine that you will receive as a pairing is phenomenal. When I visited, an option (that I sadly did not order) was acorn-fed Iberian ham. What I did order--including a particularly memorable pheasant--was cooked expertly and tasted delicious. I was also tickled by some of the other lesser-seen items on the tasting, including a white Pinot noir (try it), venison, and truffles (the mushroom kind, not the chocolate kind).
It's true that service is slow--my wife and I spent about four hours over our tasting meal--but I really enjoyed that aspect of dinner, especially because I had a great conversational partner with me. In this respect, service shined; there was at no point a feeling of being rushed to leave.
What could use some improvement, however, is the service. It wasn't bad by any means, just... perfunctory. At other restaurants at this price point that I've been to (Domaine Hudson, William and Merry, Bibou (PHL), Amorette (Lancaster, PA)) there is usually a bit more interaction with the staff, where I'm told details of my meal--sometimes where the ingredients are sourced, sometimes what they are, sometimes what I'm going to taste, and with respect to the wine (where ordered), where it's from, the year, and tasting notes.
All started out well. I was greeted, asked if I had visited before, and then told that the evening featured a special tasting menu. I was also regaled with how the featured ingredient--truffles--are sourced (truffle-snuffling pigs with a highly specific job). But once I was passed to the service team after taking my seat, everything became impersonal. The extent of my interactions were the various team members dropping off our food with a cursory "This is X item." No explanation, no joy of what is to come. I resorted to playing "guess the wine from the wine list" because the description I received was bare. And particularly confusing was that wine began lapping courses--we received several wines up to ten minutes before the next course, while we still had the previous course's wine. A shame, because they tasted great, but I wanted to not drink them all before the food they would pair with came. And I did try--I asked, for example, about a wine year, but never received a response (despite assurance I would).
To be fair, I appreciate that my visit was on a busy evening and that it's hard to miss what something tastes like once you put it in your mouth. Perhaps I'm even being a bit high in my expectations on the service front. But in a crowded field, to rest on the laurels of the taste of food may not be enough. And particularly in high-end places, I don't think an expectation of something beyond the minimum of "here's what you ordered" is out of place. Instead, I would expect a place that bills the use of high end ingredients to want those ingredients to shine, rather than be sleuthed out.
I'll absolutely be back here. The food's too good not to return. I recommend that you also visit. Bring a date, bring your mom, or convince your workplace to have a corporate dinner here. Your experience may not even reflect mine. But the possibility of that inconsistency is worth noting, and something I hope Ciro picks up on going forward.
