A bunch of us were headed to the Taylor Swift concert (don't ask) at Giant Stadium for a fun Friday night out. Since the show didn't start until 8:30ish, we thought it would be better to eat dinner in the city on the West side and then head over vs. eating really bad stadium food or hot dogs.
L'Amico was jammed packed which was really surprising to me because it's kind of in this weird location in the mid-30's. But I guess it was a nice day and they had an open air patio and everyone was looking to take advantage of the sun. We had a fairly large group of people (many of them are notorious for being late) and while I understand most restaurants don't like to seat incomplete parties, often times if you say you'll order for the table, they are willing to be flexible. They were completely inflexible here to the point where we just had to lie and say our party was reduced to 4 instead of 6. Yes, yes, it's partially our fault for having tardiness but I'm not a fan of places that are not willing to work with you at all. They could have seated us at our intended table while we ordered and waited for our friends, but instead we were seated at a tiny table in the corner that clearly wasn't going to work.
4 of us sat down and just started ordering a bunch of different dishes. We got the yellowtail ($17), tuna crudo ($17), and avocado salad ($17) to start and I got the bolognese rigatoni ($27) for my entree. My initial reaction is that this place was way overpriced. To pay almost $30 for pasta and $20 for small appetizers is kind of ridiculous (I know, it's NYC and it's sadly starting to become the norm). All of the appetizers were just meh, with the avocado salad being the most uninspiring dish of the 3.
Luckily the rigatoni was quite delicious and made up for the mediocre appetizers. The pasta was definitely the highlight of the night. But what irks me the most about this place was the service. It was PAINFULLY slow and we had to flag down our waiter countless times. When our 2 friends finally showed up, they wouldn't let them sit with us saying it was a fire hazard and told them the only room for them was at the tiny bar. We didn't want our friends to be there by myself so we quickly finished our food, skipped dessert and ended up getting one more round of drinks with them at the bar before leaving. The one nice thing the manager did was to comp our friend's drinks but the whole thing could have been avoided if they just sat us at a larger table to begin with.
Overall, the whole experience was meh. Maybe they were having a bad night and we didn't really do ourselves any favors but it was just a frustrating experience to begin with. It's kind of your basic Italian New York restaurant that gets the job done for the most part, but isn't really super exciting or worth another visit unless you happen to be in the area. For the price we paid, you can definitely get better service elsewhere but that rigatoni was pretty damn good, so I'm torn a bit here. Go and let me know what you think! Total bill: $95 with tax and tip
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