?> {"id":2823,"date":"2010-04-20T21:28:14","date_gmt":"2010-04-21T01:28:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.twofatbellies.com\/?p=2823"},"modified":"2010-04-20T21:54:13","modified_gmt":"2010-04-21T01:54:13","slug":"fontana-di-trevi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.twofatbellies.com\/2010\/04\/fontana-di-trevi\/","title":{"rendered":"Fontana di Trevi"},"content":{"rendered":"
Josh’s parents had heard good things about a new Italian restaurant in Leonia called Fontana di Trevi so we decided to try it out for dinner one Saturday night. When Josh tried to call to see if there was a wait, he got an answering machine message that said no tables were available until after 8:45 PM. So we waited until after the specified time and tried to call again but it was the same message. We decided to head over to the restaurant and check out the situation in person.<\/p>\n
Josh went inside first and he said that they told him it would only be a 10 minute wait, which didn’t seem so bad. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of room to stand in the restaurant so we hovered by the doorway, feeling very conspicuous and bad that we were pretty much right next to the first table in the front. But we figured it would only be a short wait so we just tried to be as unobtrusive as possible. The restaurant is split into two rooms, separated by a short hallway, and the hostess stand is in the smaller room.<\/p>\n
So we waited. And waited. And waited some more. Meanwhile, they never did fix the phone message because while we were standing there waiting, Josh called the number again and he got the same message. The phone by the hostess stand didn’t even ring. How do you operate a restaurant like that? How do people make reservations if they never pick up the phone? But we continued to wait, getting increasingly more agitated. We had been waiting for over half an hour, and no one came by to check on us. The hostess basically ignored our imploring looks and carried on a conversation with a table that had already paid for over 10 minutes. We were seriously annoyed by the time she finally came by and said that they were getting our table ready, and she kind of jerked her head towards the other room.<\/p>\n
Another 10 minutes later (by now we had been waiting for almost an hour), they finally did get our table ready – the same one where the hostess had been chatting with the previous patrons. It was not in the other room, as she had indicated, and we were pretty much disgusted with the level of service (or lack thereof) that we had received. An hour wait is certainly unacceptable when you’re told that a wait would only be 10 minutes. The only reason we stayed was because we were starving, and because the restaurant was packed. Surely the food had to be fantastic, right?<\/p>\n
They started us off with pieces of focaccia bread that was crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside. It had good texture with a nice olive oil flavor, and things started to look up for the meal.<\/p>\n