It pains me to write a bad review of a restaurant that up until now has been my absolute favourite.  But in the interests of fairness, I have to report that I felt very let down by Osteria Mauro in Mottram St Andrew recently.

It may just have been a mixture of bad menu choices and bad service, but I guess when you put a restaurant on a pedestal it’s only a matter of time before it falls off.  (Can a restaurant fall off something?!).  Don’t get me wrong, it won’t put me off going back, and my fellow diners had no complaints.  Just me.  Typical.

My starter of warm smoked mackerel coated in grain mustard with potato salad was particularly disappointing.  The potato salad wasn’t really salad, it was just cubes of cold boiled potato, some of which were still raw in the middle.  A few tiny cubes of red pepper were chucked over it to make it look pretty but in my book that’s not salad.   The mackerel was nice enough, but I couldn’t really pick up on the mustard at all.

And then it all went downhill for me.  I  decided to try a pizza.  The logic of the argument was, we can have pizza at home any time (and we frequently do – in our house Friday night is pizza night!), but if anyone should be able to make fantastic pizza, surely Osteria could?  So I ordered a Capriciosa without the ham – which left mozzarella, olives, artichokes and anchovies.  I’d seen several pizzas go past our table that looked enormous, their crusty brown edges just peeping over the large plates.  A huge wheel of yumminess.

But when mine arrived, it came with the ham I had requested be left off.  And not just a bit of ham, it seemed to be a whole pig.  So they took it back to make a new one.  Always a disaster in my opinion as you then have to sit and watch your friends eat.  (Although the bits I tasted of those plates within my reach were all good). 

We heard some arguing in the distance, obviously the waiter and the chef disagreeing over my order.  And then when my pizza (finally) arrived it was noticably smaller than those I’d seen go past, and a little flabby round the edges.  My guess is they’d made it smaller so it cooked quicker so I wasn’t left for too long without my order, but in addition it seemed they’d also whisked it out of the oven just that bit too soon.  No crispy edges, the cheese just past the point of melting.  To be honest, I’d rather have waited a bit longer and had a proper job.  And the result was that I was underwhelmed.  A feeling I don’t like to have in Osteria’s, it’s very disconcerting.  I’ve had just as good a pizza at Pizza Express.  I expected more and was left wanting. 

I was somewhat comforted by a magnificent sticky toffee pudding with ice cream, but again let down by the fact they’d run out of peppermint tea.  Not much to ask but surely they do stock checks and make sure they’ve got enough of everything?  Was there a sudden run on peppermint tea?!

At the end of the day, I’m willing to put this down to poor menu choice (I’ll stick to the meat or pasta next time, always reliable).  And also to the order mix up.  I noticed there were more non-Italian waiting staff than there used to be, I wonder if that makes a difference?  In the end we felt we were sufficiently recompensed by the fact that the four gin & tonics we’d ordered at the bar never made it to our bill.  I had asked for these to go on our table, and asked the girl at the bar whether I should let anyone know and she said no.  So quite how she was going to get our drinks on the bill I don’t know, but that is their loss and more than made up for the bad experience.

I’ve been told that Mauro himself is back in the kitchen.  Whether it makes much difference to what is already good food I don’t know but I hope I’ll get an opportunity to be more impressed in the future.  After all, this is my favourite restaurant and round these parts, independent venues of this quality are hard to come by.

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