"What was supposed to be an intimate, romantic evening out turned into a game to see what ridiculous thing happened next. The attention to aesthetics has sadly overshadowed attention to details of the food and overall experience. It honestly felt like someone saw a hip Manhattan restaurant on tv and tried to recreate the vibe, without understanding that you can 't recreate Manhattan anywhere else. This restaurant is in a stunning old stone building, truly beautiful. The tree in the middle of the room is a little odd but still pretty. There is no noise absorption, so between all the people and the loud thumping music, we had to shout at each other. The table was long and narrow, so that we felt very far apart but somehow there wasn 't enough room and it felt cramped. When we walked in we were greeted by two incredibly beautiful people, who stared us down like they were judging whether we were good enough, and barely said two words (or maybe we just couldn 't hear over the noise). The woman who seated us floated through the restaurant. It looked fantastic but did not make us feel welcome; it was like being seated by the Mean Girl at school. The waitstaff seems to be comprised of 4 or so middle aged men who look like they walked out of a photo of an Italian restaurant from the 40s: very stiff, wearing dress shirts and ties, sort of glowering like they don 't want to be there. They were clearly hired for, again, aesthetics, rather than experience, as the pacing and other details were very off. Most of the actual work of service seems to be done by the army of younger servers who don 't interact as much with customers. Our server (whose name I could not hear over the noise, if he even told us) asked me if I wanted a drink, I asked for sparkling water, and he walked away without asking my husband for his drink order. Then he kept coming to take our order when we were clearly still reading the menus. He did not tell us the fish of the day until we asked. When we finally put our menus down, ready to order, we had to wait quite a while for him to come back. That 's what I mean by uneven pacing; the whole evening went like that. After finishing dessert, we gave up after about 15 minutes and eventually asked a different server for our check. By the way, the menu you see online is only half (or less) of the actual menu. When you arrive, they present you with that one, plus a daily specials menu that is at least as long as the main menu. It includes wines down the bottom and is in tiny print, so it takes a minute to orient yourself to two different double-sided menus: there are at least two wine menus, two lists of appetizers, two lists of pastas, etc. so you have to keep going back and forth. That 's why we took so long to order, we kept finding new things we hadn 't seen yet on the menu. If they want to present a daily changing second menu, they should find a way to better organize that information and present it to customers. The food was inconsistent. There were some dishes that we were really happy to see; as others have noted there are dishes that are pretty rare outside Italy, and a couple that my grandfather used to make for holidays, which was very heartwarming to see. The tuna and tomato salad was very good. The fried zucchini seems to come in different sizes to different tables, but was tasty. Nearly everything was under-seasoned. They did provide a salt shaker (only salt) on the table, so my guess is they under-season for the older patrons and then let you dump salt on top if you want more. The biggest crime is that we both got pasta dishes, and none of the pasta was al dente. It 's not that the food was bad, not at all in fact. However, it doesn 't come close to the food at other restaurants in the area that are similarly priced. You could do better at one of the other Italian restaurants in Bernardsville alone. tl;dr: A hilarious amount of effort trying to look cool and authentic, not quite enough attention on BEING cool and authentic, and definitely not enough attention on consistently delicious and amazing food."
