Arezzo Restaurant

The Arezzo has a very modern look and a nice menu with a lot of things to choose from. The food is well presented - I must say I was impressed. However, the service was not good at all and neither was the food.

They really need to work more on the food and balance the ingredients that they use.

Pete (Unverified), 18/09/08

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What an evening! We booked a table for eight o'clock, on arriving rather early we headed straight for the bar for a pre meal drink. After waiting 10 minutes or more at the deserted "Marie Celeste" we gave up and continued to the restaurant. This was a mistake, as we were seated in a row of tables so tightly put together the waiters had to stand sideways to serve. We did ask to sit elsewhere but were told these table were reserved. DOH! what had we done earlier? and .....what is the difference between reserved and booked?

Anyway we duly ordered wine after being seated for 15 minutes, as we had not been offered drinks when we sat down, and it was ghastly, definitely corked! Sent it back and had a different bottle, which was fine.

However it did not get better. Starters adequate - macaroni cheese and cold meats - but v expensive. For mains I ordered white fish with wilted pak choi - wilted it was, but even more of a surprise was the fish which had transformed into salmon! My partner's pizza was poor, it lacked flavour and he suspected the base was undercooked.

Needless to say we did not stay for dessert, but went back to the bar for coffee, where the now present barman redeemed himself by serving biscuits with coffee. Shall we be back? Not in the foreseeable future.

radleas (Unverified), 10/09/08

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On a Friday night we rang Arezzo at the last minute and had no trouble booking, which was refreshing. The Italian menu looks good on paper, and the hotel is a big white Italianate villa with a luxuriously fitted-out interior, so we were ready to be impressed.

The restaurant itself is in a massive old conservatory - which is charming if a little chilly - with slightly old-fashioned decor, fresh flowers and bright white linen on the tables, and music of the 'retro' variety playing on loop. You'd be forgiven for thinking you'd fallen through a wormhole into a posh-ish eaterie in an out-of-season continental holiday destination, and the contrast between the restaurant and the front-of-house is marked. Service, though, is attentive - there were loads of smart staff, and they were trying hard, but their gameplan needs some tightening. It took a while for our drinks to arrive after we'd ordered them, one requiring fetching from the bar at the front of the hotel, though we were in no hurry so this didn't bother us massively. The pan fried chorizo salad starter was a little low on chorizo and not very flavoursome (how do you make chorizo bland?). When our mains arrived (after one set of mains had arrived and departed again, only to return via the kitchen to end up on the next table), the medium rare rib-eye steak was well done, and the garlic mash with my duck confit resembled smash - but was tasty and flavoursome nevertheless. (The same couldn't be said of the bland tomato 'stew' with it, sadly.) The steak was fine despite being wrong, the chunky chips with it were excellent, and there was an unusual jammy flavour to the steamed veg, the source of which we failed to identify. The duck confit was well-cooked, the tasty meat falling off the bone just as it should.

For dessert I chose pannacotta, which had a good texture and came with a berry compote which I would have liked more of. We also had a bottle of Hawkwell's own fizzy water (a special machine filters and carbonates tap water and puts it into nice glass bottles - more eco-friendly than importing fizz in plastic) and we enjoyed our glasses of red (Californian cabernet-zinfandel) and white (Italian pinot grigio). The wine list is decent but has some fairly hefty mark-ups.

The bill came to around £55.00, and whilst that seemed reasonable, I think we'd pay the little bit extra next time to eat somewhere where the dishes have that little bit of flair that makes all the difference between an acceptable dinner and an excellent one.

Su Jordan (DI Staff), 10/03/08

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