These comments are disappointing to hear. I moved back to Ottawa recently and have been wanting to return to Carmello's. The food was never spectacular but for the price their basic pasta dishes were decently executed and best of all, the service used to be good. It was the one place I could rely on not to have a clueless and/or unpleasant stressed out server. This was about 5 years ago, so I guess things really do change in Ottawa ;)
Food here was terrible. We ordered an antipasto plate (12.95) to share - the combination of flavour was overpoweringly pickled and salty. They didn't roast the garlic - they gave us raw garlic in some type of pickled sauce. They only gave us two small pieces of garlic bread with the dish. We ordered the lamb special (21.95) which was nothing spectacular, and slightly burnt. We shared a bit of pasta and thin crust pizza from friends, which was wholly unspectactular. Overall, $40 for 2 people not very well spent.
Popped in here with a friend for dinner before going to a show at the NAC. I had a coupon from the Entertainment booked which is why we chose this restaurant.
We arrived at 5:30 because the show started at 7:30, thinking that we would have plenty of time since it was so early. Unfortunately that was not the case. The service was extremely slow, haphazard and quite confused.
We were greeted and seated by a waitress (?) who gave us our menus, took and served our drink orders and then came to take our food orders but proceeded to tell us that she was not our waitress, it was him (she pointed to another waiter who had been passing our table the whole time we had been there but had not said a word to us) and that he would be serving us from then on.
Our "real" waiter walked back and forth beside our table for a while longer while he served the two booths on either side of us but never once stopped to say hello or talk to us.
He finally brought our food after about 40 minutes (we only ordered thin crust pizzas which is their specialty and there were about three other tables full), and then went back to the booth behind us where I heard him say "I just realised I never told you the specials". What were we chopped liver? How come we were never told the specials?
Suddenly the door opened and panic ensued. A group of 10 people came in. Tables were moved around and waiters were fluttering everywhere. From that moment on, we never saw our server again.
Needless to say after many attempts to flag down our waiter (I ended up going up to the bar to ask another server for our bill and then got an angry look from our waiter when he saw me) we finally got our bill at 7:15. We then had 15 minutes to run down Elgin to the NAC (in the artic cold), go to our car in the underground parking to bring our left overs and our coats and then get to our seat. If that was an Olympic sport we would have won a gold medal!
Now - about the food - it was actually really good! I had the piccante pizza - thin crust with sausage and sun dried tomatoes, my friend had the medium crust pepperoni.
For dessert I had the crème brulé, she had the caramel chocolate cake. She asked for coffee but never got it in all the confusion.
So - food good, service bad.......won't be going back there in a hurry...
eatme