North Italia
We had dinner at North Italia with some friends from church to celebrate a birthday. The conversation was great, as usual with this group. The food was good — no complaints there.
The service was disappointing. Now, I know serving a group of ten in a restaurant can be a challenge on the best of occasions, but this young woman dropped the ball every time it was in her hands.
The worst letdown was the wine, which accounted for about a third of our total bill.
There were two wine lists at this North Italia. One was printed on the menu and was visible on the restaurant website. The other was a laminated card found only on the table. The second wine list was considerably more expensive than the first.
The honor of choosing the wine fell to the friend whose birthday we were celebrating. To help him choose, the server sent out some sleeved-up tough guy who proudly proclaimed himself a lover of wine. Awesome, dude, but in this situation, one needs a knower of wine, not a lover. He asked our friend what kind of wine he likes — then recommended the bottle he recommends to everyone else.
When the server came back, our friend ordered one bottle from the shockingly priced wine card, and also a second, more reasonably priced bottle from the menu. He deliberately pointed at the menu and said, “the Malbec.” There was only one Malbec on the menu — a Mendoza from Argentina — so there should have been no ambiguity.
The server had apparently never opened a bottle of wine before. When each bottle arrived, she showed it to us, as if to prove it existed, and then walked away from the table for several minutes to hide her inability to operate a corkscrew. This is when she should have called the tatted guy back.
Now, I particularly like Argentine Malbecs — my everyday red at home is the delightful, inexpensive Mendoza from Costco — so when the first bottle came out, I deliberately held off.
When the second bottle came out, the server introduced it as “the Malbec.” Enjoying conversation with my friends, I didn’t take a close look at the label. The server poured me a taste, and although it wasn’t great, it wasn’t undrinkable. Kathryn and I had driven nearly an hour to meet our friends on their side of the Valley, and I was ready for a drink, so I let her pour a glass.
I don’t know what the cork did to the server to deserve the destruction she had inflicted, but I had to pick a visible chunk of it out of the glass with my finger.
The kitchen did its part, and our food arrived promptly, but not so promptly as to arouse suspicion. I had a pizza — a meat-laden pie called “the Pig” — and it was delicious.
After our dinner plates were cleared away, the server brought out dessert for the birthday guest — and then left the bill. Did any of the other guests want dessert or coffee or something a little stronger than coffee? She’ll never know.
The bill was left at my side, but the friend beside me took on the task of splitting it up, and that’s when he noticed the charge for the second bottle of wine was a lot higher than any of us expected. The bottle was still in front of me, so I took a good look at the label for the first time. It wasn’t “the Malbec” our friend thought he had ordered, but a Malbec blend from Napa Valley, apparently from the wine card.
I’m going to be charitable and accuse the server of being incompetent rather than dishonest. However, in this case, it’s hard to tell the difference. Some of the misunderstanding could have been avoided if she had simply presented both bottles to the person who ordered them. Even more so if she had announced the second bottle as “a Malbec blend” rather than “the Malbec.”
Since none of us had looked at the label when she presented the bottle, we owned at least a part of the misunderstanding. Lesson learned.
This was my second visit to this same North Italia with the same group of friends this year. Gilbert is one of the fastest-growing communities in the U.S., and nearly every imaginable restaurant chain has an outpost there. If invited again, I will gently nudge my friends to try someplace new.