Cynthia L.
Yelp
One of (maybe the) the worst dining experiences of our lives. TL:DR - the food is not worth any wait or your money. Many better experiences to choose from in SA!
We walked out of our way from the riverwalk to visit this restaurant because of the reviews, and the feature on Food Network. We arrived without reservations around 6pm and the hostess said it would just be a few minutes for our small party of 3 and asked us to wait outside. The restaurant appeared maybe half full, max. No problem.
We sit outside on benches near some other parties who also were told similar. Then the hostess comes out again and tells the party across from us it will be about 20 minutes, and she takes their name and number to call them when their table is ready. She then says the same to us, again no problem, 20 minutes is a doable wait. We walk over to the park while we're waiting. We came back after 20 minutes when we still haven't received the message that our table is ready yet, same with the party that was across from us. The "online waitlist" said we still had 2 parties ahead of us. We ask the hostess and she says the same thing. Okay, no problem, two parties in a restaurant that is still only half empty shouldn't be much longer, right?
Wrong. We ended up waiting over 1 hour and 15 minutes just to get inside Dough. We were already invested by that point and didn't want our time we had spent waiting to be wasted. The only reason we even made it in after 1 hour and 15 minutes is when another party also waiting next to us noticed that the "online waitlist" was LONGER when it had said we were next! We both went in to talk to the hostess again - and magically we both instantly had tables available. Again - not even half of the tables were filled still, inside or outside the restaurant. There was no long line of reservations ahead of us. There were no giant crowds of people showing up for reservations. There were staff just hanging around chatting and doing nothing. Just drawing up hype pretending like this place is so special to get into? I don't know.
The waiter finally shows up and gives us the whole intro to the restaurant. Blah blah we already know this, we've spent 1 hour and 15 minutes waiting and read every nook and cranny of the menu to be ready to order because obviously we're very hungry by this point. He makes sure to emphasize that the pizzas only take 90 seconds to cook in their amazing oven. Great! We should have our meal quickly, right? He tries to upsell us on appetizers we're not interested in. We can see the other tables around us have bought into his sales pitch. Definitely a red flag.
We order a glass of wine, and a few pizzas. We just wanted to be in and out of there after this wait, and we really wanted to see if this pizza was food network & worthy of every other review.
35 minutes after ordering, we still don't have the glass of wine. Just. A. Glass. Of. Wine. We are seated about 5 feet from the bar. There are several people working behind the bar. Don't know what they're doing, but obviously not just opening a bottle of wine and pouring it into a glass... eventually we just cancel the glass of wine. The waiter apologizes. We are like it is fine, but hopefully this will expedite the 90-second pizzas he promised after 35 minutes - right?
Wrong again. It took over an hour for those 90 second pizzas to reach our table. Now we've invested over 2 hours and 15 minutes into this pizza restaurant. This is the big moment for them - the pizza that should be worth over 2 hours of waiting, right? Well, the Margherita pizza has a giant burnt bubble on top of it, so not super appetizing. The pizzas are also both lukewarm. Not even bubbling hot, like it just came out of an oven after 90 seconds - which you can tell from the state of the cheese in the attached photo. It's obviously been sitting there for a while and no one brought it over to us. The taste of both pizzas is also just very bland. Not the amazing flavors I'm expecting of fresh ingredients from Italy that he went on and on in his speech about. We've been to Italy. We've had many amazing Margherita pizzas elsewhere. This - and the other pizzas - not worth your time or money.
Following our "meal", we declined dessert and requested the check from the waiter. After another 20 minute wait (seriously) he still had not brought the check to us. I had to go over to the hostess stand and I asked her if she could get the check or if we could pay her. She said no, it had to be our waiter. I told her we had already been waiting another 20 minutes to get our check from him. Suddenly, now that it was time to pay, the manager became very interested in our party and voila, the check appeared at our table.
We spent almost 3 hours of our weekend trip on this restaurant just for a few bland pizzas. Do not make the same mistake as us. Run away and go to one of the many other great restaurants in the area.