ALFI Italian Bar & Restaurant Spitalfields

Beautiful food! We challenged Alfi with some dietary requirements (gluten/ wheat free/ vegetarian) and they came up trumps! We really had a lovely experience with food and wine proving to be top-tier! Lovely service too! Fede, our waitress, was FAB!

My first one star review of the year. I eat out A LOT and this is one of the worst places (bottom 3) I've been to since I moved to London and have eaten at over 400 spots. It appears most of the ratings come from accounts with 1 or just several reviews, which makes makes me question the validity of the high ratings. Yes, Google reviews can be bought and it's truly a crisis in London. Absolutely abysmal food. Service was also really crap - I do think they intentioned to try, but the waitress wasn't really English fluent (also quite scatterbrained, we had to repeat our orders twice, and finally (for good measure) had her read them out for us the third time as she kept on bumbling during the order. That was fine, maybe she was new. She, however, really did not know how to deal with the gluten free person in our party. Despite a lot of the items on the menu saying gluten free, they insisted that there's high levels of cross contamination on everything. Our guest said she's okay with some levels of cross contamination, and offered some alternatives and options (we discussed this with the waitress for about 10 minutes or so), but the waitress did not seem to understand - saying everything was off limits with the exception of the burrata and tomatoes. It took a lot of convincing to get her to agree to serve the fish. I think the staff should not intervene to this degree as they don't know the severity of the intolerance or preference, and insist someone not get certain items. However, this made us pretty uncomfortable and feel very fussy. The waitress' English was not great so probably the source of some of the miscommunication. Then the food - first starter came out after 20 minutes of waiting in zero order... one person got their mains 15 minutes after the other and was just a timing mess. Also we never got the focaccia we ordered. We mentioned it and the waitress just muttered "oh sorry" and moved on. 🤷🏻‍♀️ The fennel salad had zero seasoning, was literally just raw chopped fennel. We hardly touched it. The seabass was served like the picture, almost thrown together in haphazard fashion. The pizza with ham and burrata was literally a sauceless bread with some prosciutto thrown on. I suppose that was my mistake ordering. A third of the pizza was blackened and charred below too, not a good texture. All the pasta dishes we ordered came like they were just thrown together - you can see the state of the Ragu (all sauce and looks like a soupy mess). I didn't take pictures closeup because they looked like plated in such a rush, there was no beauty or symmetry in the presentation. Like gloop on plates. They told us they do not make the pasta fresh as well. Crab ravioli had no flavour, same with the ragu, one piece of meat in the whole bowl. Tasted like Tesco microwave food. The presentation was just all terrible for everything. The only thing that was passable in terms of flavour was the fennel sausage, which was alright, but served barely warm and would have been much better hot. Overall, terrible experience. Absolutely avoid. We also booked on a Fork offer for 50% off but the fine print (which is not on the order page but in the 'restaurant description') says that booking through The Fork is only for a certain small part of the menu (which I'm still not sure which part, it's intentionally opaque). We were okay to pay full price for everything and didn't fuss, but very disingenuous and shady. Especially paired with the abysmal state of food and service. Please avoid.