Delizie D'Italia Review

As a family group we visited Berlin for a special birthday celebration and we were recommended to visit this restaurant. We were unable to contact the restaurant on the Friday morning as the only way to book was online through their booking agent Quandoo. We therefore booked a table for 6 and received confirmation of our booking - 6 people on a Friday night 2 weeks before Christmas. It transpired that the Restaurant was fully booked - not surprising given the time of year - but they had not informed the online agent. They therefore cancelled our booking. We received a further e-mail from the agent later in the day. This was in German - again unsurprisingly as we were in Germany - despite the fact that we had booked online in English. We were busy being tourists and failed to notice the e-mail and even if we had it is doubtful whether we would have understood it. This of course is no fault of the restaurant. The outcome was that we were left with nowhere to eat at one of the busiest times of the year. Our special celebration was somewhat sabotaged. Had we been German speakers this may have been averted but, regardless of this, the fault lay in the fact that the restaurant has a booking system that does not work. Through a simple lack of communication we were badly let down. My recommendation is that any tourists should double check that a confirmed online booking can be relied upon. The manager /owner explained numerous times that she had cancelled our booking with Quandoo but didn't seem to grasp the fact that we had not got the message - for whatever reason. She offered us a glass of Prosecco, however, 6 people standing in the middle of a busy restaurant; getting in the way of the staff whilst sipping complementary Prosecco would have gone nowhere towards solving the fact that we had nowhere to eat! Electronic systems are all very well but in the end their success or failure always comes back to good old fashioned communication and this is where they failed badly!