Lucinda O’Sullivan’s restaurant review: At L’Enoteca di Napoli calamari tasting like wallpaper paste is served with an attitude of doing you a favour

The food at L’Enoteca di Napoli was a mixed bag and the service was far from dolce

"My anelli di calamari fritti were anything but ‘anelli’ (small thin) but instead were large, pale, cracklingly dry specimens, looking and tasting as if they’d been dipped in wallpaper paste." Photo: Lucinda O'Sullivan

Lucinda O'Sullivan

“Stay, take your time, relax,” said ‘il signor’ in charge as I asked for the bill at L’Enoteca di Napoli, an Irish-owned Italian wine bar on Fenian Street, and sibling of Il Caffe di Napoli on Westland Row. However, it felt a bit like closing the stable door after the horse had bolted. “I thought we had to rush out the door as this table is booked?” I replied, giving him the quizzical eye, having consumed three courses and a bottle of vino rapidly.

“If you want a bill, I’ll give it to you, otherwise take your time,” he said. We’d arrived in the late afternoon, following a meeting in town, passing an advertising clapperboard outside the door, and asking the waitperson who met us if we could have a table for two. There were only three diners in the place, two ladies by a side wall, and a man down the back of the room. To our surprise, with four or five lines of empty tables set perpendicularly across the room from a long service counter, they dragged a table for two to within 18 inches of the two ladies by the wall.