Bruce C.
Yelp
I usually keep bad reviews to myself. I've never given a 1-Star rating but, here goes.
We were visiting Fresno, had a busy day, and, instead of waiting at DiCicco's on a Saturday night, I had the bright idea of trying something new and pop-in to this place, based on the Yelp 4 Star rating, for a quick meal.
Service - there is a waiting list and you wait standing outside the shop. When we arrived there were six people, two parties, preceding us. We checked in at 6:20 PM for a party of two and given an estimated time of 20 minutes. We were told takeout would take 45 minutes so we took the shorter estimate. We waited in the car until 6:40 after everyone else had been called in. Standing at the door I saw a vacant table-for-two along the wall expecting to be called soon.
At 6:55, after being ignored by the staff, who I know saw me gazing through the window, and wondering why in tarnation we weren't sitting the vacant table, we gave up and, exasperated, drove away. At 7:05PM driving down Chestnut, they called, inquiring if we were "still interested" in the table. Well, there was already a sunk cost in the wait and no immediate prospects for a meal, so we turned around and, at 7:10, were seated AT THE VERY SAME VACANT TABLE. Our order was taken, perhaps, 5 minutes later.
The orders, a sausage sandwich and a kitchen-sink calzone (vide infra), arrived 45 minutes later. Finally, gratefully, we were out of there at 8:20 PM. Two hours, TWO HOURS, at a hole-in-the-wall-run-of-the-mill-strip-mall Italian restaurant where it should take no longer than fifty minutes, at the most an hour tops, from sign-in to check.
Food - Lets talk about the bland and mediocre calzone containing the minimum of cheese. And the sausage sandwich with, what? Ground sausage (??). It's something I've never experienced. Ground sausage is a credible ingredient on a Domino's pizza, I've had many. And not that there's anything wrong, comparatively in this case, with Domino's Pizza - which is what we should have ordered in the first place - but I submit ground sausage on soggy bread with a few red peppers and onions is not any sausage sandwich I am familiar with. Heaven only can only imagine what the chicken parm, mushroom ravioli or carbonara are like. Let's leave that to others.
Ambience - hole-in-the-wall-run-of-the-mill-strip-mall Italian restaurant. Clean. Sturdy, not wobbly tables.
Value - prices close to DiCicco's but, at the risk of being redundant, not even approaching the quality.
Perhaps it's the California Minimum Wage law that limits the number of servers and preparers that explains the delays and quality. I don't know.
If