Mahendralal S.
Yelp
This restaurant is comically poor. Of course it fits the part, as hipster chic down a quiet lane, with clearly expensive renovations and a nice-looking open kitchen. But it is a foodie trap: food and service that looks young, fresh, exciting, expectedly geared for the yuppie rich who don't know but want to be seen to know, food; but obviously Ostuni is an under managed establishment aiming only for the uninitiated connoisseur. My party fell for it. Whatever the chef is cooking, he obviously is not tasting. Simple mistakes in the preparation of beans, the overcooking of pasta, forgetting ingredients that are listed on the menu (!), using ingredients (i.e. the olive starters) that literally taste like the discards of a Sainsbury's ready-to-eat. The orecchiette tasted and smelled like the kibble I feed to my dog - it was so overly seasoned and single-noted I'm not quite sure how this ever made it onto a draft menu. The staff seem to be uninterested in discussing the menu, and unaware of by now obvious dietary questions of one member of our party who was dairy-free. Does anyone taste the food here? If you don't know the menu, you probably shouldn't be on the floor. The server also brought a bottle of Italian white wine in an ice bucket filled with cold water and a few cubes. It was quite lovely dripping water all over the table. Whatever Ostuni thinks it is, it is not. Another over-priced example of a food scene that is so desperately trying to look like New York, it doesn't even get the basics correct.