Dear Italian restaurant and pizza place
Can I call you IRP for short? I just wanted to let you know that I am firing you as our weekly pizza place. We won't be ordering our 2 extra large pizzas every weekend, or the 10 extra large 8 times a year when the family comes into town, or the once a month stop on a weekday for dinner. We are going to have to move on.
This is kinda sad for us - both my husband and I came from communities with large Italian populations and we know good Italian food. We were so happy after 10 years in horrible pizza towns, that we moved here and found you. If you check your POS - you will see that we ordered just about every weekend.
When we first moved to town, we loved the story on the back of the menu about how your grandmother brought her sauce recipe from Italy. It was the best we had ever tasted - still brings back great memories. But, as time went on, that great sauce (which was probably not cheap to make) got change to a good canned sauce, and then a bad one.
We know that the last few years have been rough - but it seems like the choices you made were, well, bad. Instead of raising prices and keeping your standards, you went cheap. You switched purveyors every time someone gave you a deal. So, in the last few years, the good italian sausage, became cheap TVP crap, the olive oil in the pizza crust became cheap olive oil, and now the cheapest vegetable oil. The last straw was the fake mozzerella cheese - you are an Italian restaurant - can you use the real stuff?
My favorite dish was the veal parmagan. It went from real veal - 2 4 ounce pieces on a bed of 1 cup of pasta, to last night's version. It was a 2.5 oz veal hockey puck served on 5 cups of pasta. The visual appeal of that timy piece of meat in the swimming pool of spagetti, was just too much. I would have rather that instead of keeping the menu price the same as 10 years ago, that you kept the quality and upped the prices.
It was a bit disconcerting to see signs announcing your new "all you can eat" signs all over the restaurant. I know that you are doing this to raise sales, but I just wanted to remind you that most people who knew you in your glory, know that they are not getting real shrimp at an AYCE bar for $9.99 per person. And, just a reminder, the customers who go to these troughs are fickle. Like any self-respecting two bit whore, they will go to the next place that has the cheapest prices. Soon, it will be easier to just hand people money when they come to the door......
The result is the same. You drove off the people who want quality with the cheap ingredients. For those in the community who are watching their eating out budget, if you serve them crap - do you think they will return?
So, unfortunately, we have to let you go. We hear that there is a new Italian restaurant in town, and we are going to check them out.
Sincerely
Your customers.
Food Write
The Responsible Serving of Alcoholic Beverages
