A Tale of 2 Sittings - Villagio 28 April 2007

I once again found myself basking in the Manchester sunshine in Canal Street and after an enjoyable visit to Villagio last month I thought it would be the safe option for a good lunch. How wrong could I be?

Things started well enough when we were seated by the window allowing us to indulge in our favourite pastime of people-watching. As it turned out, this was to prove a welcome distraction from the poor food and shoddy service.

Our orders were taken for the starters and time ticked by. It was difficult to see what the hold-up was given that only four other parties were dining in the restaurant at the time. Maybe it was because of the care and attention the kitchen was giving to the freshly cooked food. This was an optimistic notion soon dispelled when our starters did eventually arrive 45 minutes later.

I’d ordered the mussels in a tomato sauce and I can say without doubt, they were the worst mussels I’d ever seen in my life. The mussels hadn’t been cleaned, most of them were barely open and the ones I could prise out simply disintegrated. I was sure that I’d spend most of the evening in the bathroom if I’d dared to eat any of them. My partner’s starter of deep fried calamari was little better. The batter was thick and doughy, the calamari was rubbery and the only cooking involved seemed to be taking them out of the freezer and putting them in a deep fat fryer.

We both ate what we thought safe and drowned our sorrows in the house wine which turned out to be the best thing on offer. Despite the fact that I’d eaten none of starter, the waiter asked if I’d enjoyed it and took the full plate away without question. It should have been obvious to anyone that those mussels were not fit for human consumption but the ‘head in the sand’ approach was obviously the favoured method of service.

We awaited our main course with a degree of trepidation although it was the same I’d eaten there last time and I was hoping the quality would be matched. During this wait I was asked to move from my seat several times so that the staff could mop up the water leaking from the dishwasher behind the bar. Eventually they realised that this wasn’t really appropriate and asked if we were happy to move to another area of the restaurant.

This seemed to cause no end of confusion for the serving of our main courses and a succession of bemused waiters kept peering around the corner to see if we’d been given our food yet. The main courses of prawns, chilli and linguine arrived another 45 minutes later and did look slightly more appetising than our first course. It then seemed that in all the complication of producing two very simple pasta dishes the kitchen had forgotten to cook our garlic bread which we had to ask for again and which was provided about ten minutes after our main course. By this stage we had been there so long we had to ask for another bottle of wine.

The main course was OK but was nowhere near as good as the first time I’d tried it. The sauce was watery and the pasta claggy and the highlight of that course was the garlic bread which had been cooked fresh and served straightaway.

Two and half hours later we’d finally finished our distinctly average meal and asked for the bill. There was no recognition of the disruption of being moved, the time we’d had to wait for our food or the poor quality of our starters. If it had been my restaurant I would have least offered to pay for some of the drinks for our meal being disturbed by having to up sticks half way through. Instead they were happy to process the bill and get us out of there asap!

The whole experience left me extremely disappointed and utterly convinced that I will never dine there again. It is not even as though Villagio is an inexpensive option. Its prices are comparable to other Italian restaurants such as Stock which are in a different league in culinary terms.
The management has seriously taken its eye of the ball and regular Canal Street visitors are unforgiving. If Villagio continues in this vein, it’s unlikely that it will survive to see Christmas.