Aamore Italian Restaurant - Thame

We had a wonderful Easter Sunday evening meal at Aamore - the staff were so attentive and the food was fantastic - we usually avoid Italian restaurants as my partner is a Coeliac but he had a wonderful meal and we both left keen to return again - he even said it’s the only Italian he would go to! To round off a lovely evening we did the Easter cracking egg tradition with the staff - thank you team

Unfortunately, this just wasn’t it. We arrived at 7.45 PM, and had to find a waiter at the bar to show us our table - another waiter then thought we were having dessert? So there was already a misunderstanding as we came in. Most tables were full but also mostly everyone had their food already when we came in. We were shown our table and they took about 15 minutes to take our order, which is quite a while, surely you’d take a drinks order first. We ordered everything together as we were quite hungry at this point. We asked for tap water for the table but were never given this, bless the nice table next to us who gave us the rest of their water when they left. It took about 50 minutes from the point of ordering (!!!) for two pizzas to arrive?! There’s really no excuse for that as pizzas can be made within minutes. My fiancé is gluten free, and the menu mentioned it catered really well towards this which is one of the reasons we wanted to try this out. His pizza arrived and you could tell it wasn’t made fresh - they had bought one of those Schär bases and just put some toppings on top. My dough was a bit better, but the toppings were scarce even though I had a meaty pizza. Also really overdone and dry - I wish it had more sauce, cheese, just anything! Dominoes and Papa Johns do better (gluten-free) pizzas 🥲 The waiter also dropped a greasy knife from the table next to us on my fiancé’s jeans and wasn’t even apologetic about it. They never said ‘sorry for the wait’ or anything like this - and only had two members of staff for the whole place until halfway through our wait when a third one popped up. I don’t know if they put their 10% service charge sneakily in their prices, as I wasn’t willing to pay this if it was added on at the end. Even though it states on their menus that a compulsory 10% charge is added, it wasn’t added to the final bill, so either they knew they messed up or they’ve already added it to their prices, at almost £20 for a pizza. I’ve seen they’ve upped their prices recently, after the re-brand from Acquerello to Aamore. They could have also benefited from having someone look over the menus, as a lot of typos are present. They’re really trying to be an authentic Italian restaurant but unfortunately we didn’t receive this experience at all, and won’t be going back.