• Added: 19th of May 2007
• Area: Dundee
• Category: Restaurants

Dundee DD2 1AS

lloydalex said
The Bistro with the Leastro

Average Cost for 3 courses without wine (each) = 22

The outside looks boutique and attractive, the interior has stacked wine and looks very French or Italian and you think this tiny restaurant could almost get away with being a small boutique bistro. Then the reality of the interior hits you. The seats are at different heights. One is on the wall and is high and the opposite seat is a cheap wooden creaky seat which is low. The table covers are black leather. They have what looks like white paint spilled on them and are sticky. The double lights on the wall have only one bulb working. The cutlery gets zero out of 10 and I have not seen it since my school canteen. Old, blunt, forks with bent prongs and with some grandparenty flower effect; in fact I have not seen this cutlery on sale for years. We did have it in my school canteen though. It was also laid out incorrectly (Small knife on the inside, big on the outside). Cheap thin napkins.

The menu arrives printed on draft setting on a home printer on thin paper, which was half in and half falling out of a polly-pocket. The wine menu was worse. Actual spelling and grammar mistakes. The wine I ordered was a blend of pinot grigio and pinot bianco at just under 13. Probable wholesale cost 3. It was bland and had no bouquet whatsoever. It did have a plastic label which was falling off, and shockingly this place doesn't do wine coolers, so the wine -which was on a small table beside a candle- became warm after only a short time. Unbelievably, when I said I'll have the pinot grigio please, from a list of 5 of which there was only one pinot grigio, I was told immediately just to say the number. I had to lift the wine menu again, look and say number three please, at which point the waiter simply walked off saying nothing. Bizarrely the wine list had blatant grammar and spelling mistakes.

I ordered the most expensive starter. 4.90 garlic butter with mushrooms, pate and salad. It arrived as three heavily battered mushrooms as hard as rocks. Impossible to cut and just cracked eventually when this watery grey liquid fell out. Actually it was disgusting, with a big bland dollop of mayonnaise on the side which was springy, congealed and tasteless. The salad consisted of a pile of cheap iceberg lettuce crudely sliced into strips like a kebab shop. My partner had garlic bread which was quite hard on the outside but otherwise seemed OK.

The main was Chicken a La Crema. Again, when I ordered I was asked just to point at the dish on the menu like a Neanderthal. This is terrible for a restaurant which is amongst the most expensive in the city. I then was told after about 10 minutes that the chicken would be just chicken and I would need to order a side order like a baked potato. Chicken a La Crema, then plonk a great, huge Baked Potato onto the plate? I couldn't picture it so I said salad: which I later regretted. For an added 4 I was given a starter soup bowl with a couple of slices of iceberg again, two whole, dry olives, and one quartered tomato of the cheapest quality you'll find in the supermarket. Oh and a couple of dry slices of cucumber which were withered at the sides. The creamy mushroom sauce was sparse and extremely thin; it ran off the chicken like water. The chicken was not filleted and had little meat to be had that was not filled with veins. My partner had pizza for main, which was tasteless. Massively salty supermarket pepperoni on not-fully-cooked dough.

I couldn't bare to stay for desert as the menu was so hit or miss. No actual dishes, just genres of pudding; cheesecake, pie, ice cream etc.

So Dandilly's external appearance is quite nice; smart, Italian. The inside is not so good; tight, squeezed, tacky, unkempt furniture and furnishings. Bad food, bad service, bad wine. Avoid if you can.