Cafe & Bar il Bamboccio

We went here with friends for dinner. Our friends received their meals very quickly and my meal took another 30 minutes for and my wife’s did not arrive at all. We went to a 7/11 and she got a better meal for half the price. The meals we did receive were average at best !!!I Not recommended at all....

Visited September 2019

Il Bamboccio is an Italian-style restaurant in the restaurant area under Nagoya station in Japan. Some friends and I stopped there to have a nice conversation over food & wine. We ordered some small dishes and since I recently did some wine tasting in Italy, I volunteered to choose the bottle and en...ded up picking the priciest one on the menu at 3980 yen (around US$35), a 2010 Montelpuciano d'Abruzzo. This is considered a good "value" wine - not stellar - but 2010 was a great year so I figured it would at least be decent. The waiter returned with a bottle and proceeded to open it and pour glasses for each of us. He then set the bottle down and dashed off. I picked up my glass and tasted it, and was taken aback at how sour it was. When I looked at the label, I found that it was a 2013 - not the 2010 that I ordered - and definitely too young to drink. It may also have been mishandled or stored improperly in the hot weather, because it was really sour. In any case, I called the waiter back and told him that he had given us the wrong bottle and that it was too sour to drink. He apologized, but said that it was in fact the wine on the menu and that he was not in a position to replace the bottle at their expense. I said that I wanted to talk to the manager about it, so he again disappeared for a little while and came back claiming that the manager said nothing could be done and that we would have to pay the full price listed on the menu for the 2010 vintage since we already drank some of it. Bait and switch. It was definitely not the occasion to escalate the problem further, and one of the local people in my party explained that even though Nagoya is one of the three biggest cities in Japan, they are still rather backwards when it comes to wine. "You're better off ordering what they know best--beer, sake, or shochu." Sound advice indeed. In all fairness, the dishes we ordered were quite good, so it was not a total loss. As I paid the bill, though, I was still feeling resentful and let the waiter know in no uncertain terms that he had swindled me and that I would warn my friends. So that, dear friends, is my warning. Bon apetit!

Visited July 2015