Giovanni's Italian Restaurant

Great food.....terrible service

They were out of a lot of food items. The main one that bothered me was BREAD at an Italian restaurant. Meanwhile, a Publix & Harris Teeter were within a half mile. The Lobster Ravoli tasted and looked very similar to a product from Costco. A one star is pretty generous. Spend your hard earned elsewhere.

Be Patient. And have fun!! If you’re not in a rush and want okay food and free entertainment - This must be the place. A first time for us.. I really like finding local places. Sadly this was just “meah” A Special Holiday Menu was served - but I don’t think the staff knew what was on it based on responses. They also need someone to proofread the menu before printing. (Hahaha - I probably could use one as well but whatever). Let me be clear Staffing was NOT an issue - there was plenty of staff all over the place / but they seemed confused and definitely not sure who was doing what. Our waiter (who didn’t introduce himself) could be described as the guy in the crown. At first he stopped by every few minutes and kept telling us he would be back. Later on we joked he must have quit because he vanished after we asked for drink refills. We reminded him twenty minutes later when he finally returned to the dinning room. Even still after sitting and eyeballing staff for a while (10 more minutes) we finally served ourselves refills. Gum on the wall next to our table. Shame on the guests who left this. But ewwww - It wasn’t like it was hard to see. Table level right there…. old building, small dining area, old chairs that felt like the legs were splitting under us (we traded ours out with an empty table for equally bad chairs) and electricity issues. The lights kept dimming and brightening randomly throughout dinner. 2 of our 3 plates were left about half full - they were taken without asking if we wanted anything to go. We asked about dessert and a good looking tray of desserts came over / but options that were not in the menu. When I asked about the “spumoni” the waitress (now covering for the crown guy) looked at the dessert tray and said that’s not here. ITS ICE CREAM. Of course it’s not on the warm tray that’s sitting out….. we skipped the dessert and waited for the check - while we attempted to do the scan and pay our waiter told us not to bother it was “finicky” and wouldn’t work. Based on that we had to try anyway. For the record - it did not work - it wasn’t even the correct bill.

My friends and I had a 4 top reservation for NYE. We were sat promptly, but remained ungreeted for over 20 minutes. The dining room was full, and the staff appeared overwhelmed, so we looked past it. We waived down the nice host for menus and missing place settings. The next table's server came over and said he'd go find our server for us. It was apparent the entire time that he was our server, but we just went with it. He returned and asked if we "knew what we wanted"; no introduction, no drink order, no nightly specials. We gave him our entire food order and expected him to come back for our drink order, which is backwards, but we wanted to give him a chance. So after 15 minutes, we walked to the busy bar, where we were helped with no issue. We also saw our server waiting at the kitchen window . Had he spent 2 minutes of that time maintaining our table, or at least making himself visible, we would have not had an issue. Another 15 minutes go by, and a host brings out the wrong appetizer to the table (we ordered mussels and oysters, she brought cheesesticks). She insisted that we enjoy it while she figured out what was going on. Another patron brought the mussels, but the oysters were still missing. 1/2 the table's salads were brought out before the oysters arrived. No refills were offered, and we shared a little chuckle with the adjacent table because one of their guests refilled his own non alcoholic beverage. A very helpful server came over just to say hello, and ask how things were in general. We shared our concern with her because we had other plans approaching - at this point, we were there for almost 2 hours with no entrees. She said she couldn't find management, then went further say that she checked with our server, who had no idea what our entree order was. Our server that we hadn't seen for an hour, walked out with food in-hand, and placed it on our table. Unfortunately, it wasn't ours, so he gathered the entrees and delivered them to the next table. He aggressively claiming that he was management, saying the kitchen was overwhelmed, and asked with a very dismissive tone, "if we wanted the food or not?" Between my husbands 10 plus years of BOH experience, my 20 years of FOH management experience, and our co-guests current tenure as a bar manager in formal establishemnt...we saw right through his excuses. He was in the weeds and had zero accountability for that. Management not following up or doing table touches was also odd. The mussels were splendid, and the oysters were great! Our table probably would have been his best tip of the night given our collective backgrounds, and the fact that it was a holiday. We were told by the helpful server that we could leave, and our apps were comp'ed, but we really wanted to pay for them so it wouldn't be reduced to us wanting a free meal. We had already bought our own drinks from the bar, so the only thing left to comp were the 2 apps since our food never made it. The bottom line is this was a shared fail; 90% from the server, and the rest on management because on a night like NYE, it's their duty to make themselves visible as well. These issues were avoidable. I gave the helpful server the cash in my pocket for her efforts; she deserved more, but I spent my cash when I had to get up and get my own drink at the bar. I wished the service matched the food. We don't live close, so we won't be back. It's not worth rolling the dice and hoping to get good service.

We celebrated New Year's Eve here and it was delicious! Very quaint and nice atmosphere. Wait staff is wonderful and very nice and pleasant. All three people in our party had the Seafood Pasta. It was absolutely FULL of seafood. Shrimp, mussels, lobster, fish and linguine. The sauce is perfect. The bread was light and had an outer crisp. We had dicious roasted veggies and a light house salad. We were dieing with someone who was born and raised in Italy, and they thought the food and sauce were wonderful! You'll enjoy your meal!

Had Reservations for 20:00 . We had no silverware, no drinks and no nothing till around 20:20. We order our appetizers and entrees around 20:25. Server never gave any refills or checked on us. The appetizers were very good . 21:35 rolled around and we didn’t have any entrees so we asked for manager and no one knew where to locate manager and we were told our server didn’t know what we ordered. We told the server we would like our check because we had another engagement. This was probably the worst dinning experience I’ve ever had. The little bit of food we got seemed to be prepared very well but the ball was fumbled on the service.