Alison
Lazy and discriminatory approach to food allergies. Poor quality ingredients
We chose Bella Italia out of several nearby Italian restaurants in Brighton as the menu contained everything to suit the whole family - including calamari, carbonara, and vegan pizza options. To their credit, the local restaurant staff were lovely (hence not getting a one star rating). It’s a shame about the company’s attitude though. I was initially pleasantly surprised when they asked about food allergies, thinking this showed good diligence. However, as soon as I mentioned that my daughter has a (mild) allergy to two very specific types of nuts, we were surprised to be told (in an pizza and pasta restaurant) that the options would be ‘very limited’ and we needed to use a bar code to find out what it safe to eat. The bar code took us to a Bella Italia website page which may as well have said ‘we can’t be bothered to work out the ingredients in our own food or take any precautions so anyone with any kind of allergies isn’t welcome and shouldn’t eat here’. There was nothing on the menu containing the nuts to which my daughter reacts. We decided to use our own knowledge and understanding of the extent of it own daughter’s risk levels and order calamari - something she loves and orders whenever she sees it on a menu anywhere. They returned with our drink orders and casually told us (after the kids had taken a drink) that they won’t serve her calamari or anything else that goes in the fryer because they couldn’t guarantee it’s safe. It seemed that even fries etc were off the menu. For a nut allergy! They wouldn’t allow us to use our own judgement and basically banned from eating half the menu because of ‘company policy’. I’m horrified to know that a restaurant chain don’t know what ingredients are in their own food. What does that tell you about the quality of the food? Well the vegan pizza had little lumps of what was clearly pre-frozen and chopped spinach, whilst the carbonara had such large, hard, and salty lumps of pancetta that my other daughter couldn’t chew them and had to pick them out. The calzone lacked sauce and was too dry (how is that even possible with a calzone?) whilst the sauce in the pizzas was all distributed around the edges /crusts with very little in the main part of the pizza. Lovely staff but the company seems to be around 30 years behind the times regarding their ingredients, quality, and their appalling and discriminatory attitude to those with food allergies.