Sonia r.
Yelp
It is hard to just think about writing the review for this establishment as I had to relive the nightmare experience all over again. But I felt obligated to warn others of what could happen here.
We visited this restaurant around 4:00PM on 6/25/2023( Not a rush hour but not many dining options for us at the time due to majority of restaurants were closed 3:30~7:30 in Venice or elsewhere in Italy...)
While plenty of seats available outdoor, the waiter took us inside claiming those outdoor seats are reserved for the evening party group. That should be the early sign of the level of service we were to receive and MORE serious hazards to come. Pizzas, seafood risotto and 3 lasagnas were ordered by our group of 7 plus a takeout order. When food arrived, the most disappointing items were the lasagnas. Soggy and pale with hardly much flavors in them contrary to waiter's claim, duh. I asked if we could get some tomato sauce to add to the lasagna, the same waiter said flatly "No!" Finally, we asked for red crushed pepper after he mistakenly brought whole clove black peppers. We noticed that the red pepper delivered to us was a little finer than the typical red peppers you would see in other places. After the first few bites into the food sprinkled with it, we quickly realized that this pepper was quite different -- WAY spicier than we've tried before. We ALL are, to various degrees, experienced spicy foodies. We picked up the square glass jar and shocked to read the "Carolina Pepper" label on the jar. While I did hear about Carolina pepper's name being thrown around a few times throughout the years during spicy food conversations with acquaintances back home in U.S., I have never tried it personally. We quickly stopped ingesting more of this nasty stuff; alas, it's a bit too late as it started working it's way into our system just about 10 minutes later while we were still waiting for takeout being ready. My niece in her 20s needed to run back to the apartment ASAP to nurse her stomach pain. Soon after, it hit me; when it did, it immobilized me with numbing fingers and palms, nausea, agonizing stomach pain and profuse sweating on my upper body. My family told me how helplessly they all felt witnessing me going through this. While all this was happening, the other wait staff ( not the perpetrating waiter ) were coming nearby and commenting "If it is spicy, why did she kept on eating it?", "She asked for the most hot spicy pepper!" Sadly, neither is true.
When I finally recovered from this ordeal enough to reject those unsubstantiated accusations, one of the waiters brought a tin-can pepper jar telling us that they DO have what we asked for in the first place. When we questioned why the waiter serving us brought the pepper in question, he could not respond other than reiterating falsehood mentioned above.
To us, that pretty much explained how intentional the perpetrating server's action was.
Fortunately, whatever ill intentions that particular waiter harboured against us ( other than possibly the fact that we are Asians which we can't help ) it did not kill me, although, I shall admit at the height of all that agony, I DID imagine all sorts of unfortunate outcomes that might have happened including death since I had never encounter that kind of pain before in my 63 years of life.
Sidenote: I did Google this pepper and found out that the adverse reactions include stroke and even death in rare occassion; so I should count myself quite lucky in the face of prejudicial harm inflicted by this establishment.
No paying visitor should EVER deserve this kind of treatment.
Shame!!!
