My Honest Review of Pelato Charleston
Pelato is one of the many new restaurants to hit the food scene downtown recently. It’s captured a lot of attention for their frozen cocktails and delicious Italian cuisine. As a foodie and Italian cuisine enthusiast, I knew I had to check it out!
While they have only been open a few weeks, there are some major kinks to be worked out. In my opinion, when you open a restaurant in Charleston, there really isn’t much of a grace period to work out your problems; everything needs to be perfect before you open the doors, that’s just the standard in the Charleston food and Bev scene.
We didn’t make a reservation because we just wanted to sit at the bar, so this could have altered our experience, however from the moment we sat down it was super chaotic. There were like 7 different bartenders (the bar area was super small and tight), and at least 4 of them came up to us at different times saying the same thing, giving us the ‘rundown’, asking for our drink order, etc. There was just a massive lack of communication between the employees.
I started with a glass of wine, served in an awful, chubby stemmed wine glass (iykyk) and then wanted to try a cocktail after. I ordered a Hugo Spritz, which the bartender made incorrectly, and it was also served in the same tiny wine glass. It was no where near the serving size of a normal cocktail, so first order of business is order some new glasses!
Onto the food - they say they don’t do ‘appetizers vs entrees’ everything is kind of just meant to be shared. I do like this idea because it gives you the opportunity to try a few things if you are with a couple of people. We started with the burrata crostini, and it was very good. Burrata served with tomato sauce on toasted sesame bread. Then we order their house vodka pasta and the pesto pasta. The vodka pasta was very good as well, slightly salty, but good nonetheless. The pesto on the other hand, had absolutely no flavor. It was also served with peas in it which I thought was kind of weird. It needed a lot more salt, cheese, and just overall flavor.
We ended up making friends with the lady who sat down next to us at the bar and she wanted to order a bottle of wine for all of us to share. One of the seven bartenders offered her to try the bottle before she bought it (as many restaurants typically do) and then after he had done that another bartender came over and said to us: “we don’t typically do samples, he’s still training so he didn’t know, we’ll allow it this one time though” What a weird and rude fucking thing to say to a customer who is about to spend over $100 on a bottle of wine! Even if they don’t typically do that, tell the server, not us. And going back to my first point, the training, especially on how to serve drinks, needs to be completed before opening day.
We finished with the frozen espresso martini, which was actually delicious and I probably would go just for this and then hop to Melfi’s, Le Farfalle, or Costa for a proper Italian meal. Overall, the food was good, but no better than anywhere else and the service was really just not up to Charleston standards.
