Fratelli Restaurant, Riocan Drive, Barrhaven - GROSS!

Recently my husband and I went to Fratelli in Barrhaven.  Phil was excited to go, as he's heard the restaurant hyped up in adverts by Lowell Green on 580 cfra for years, not that his is an opinion to follow.

To put it mildly, we were upset with our entire meal there.  Restaurant reviews often begin with discussing the decor and service, which was all pleasant, but we went for the food, not the atmosphere.

To start out, Phil ordered the carpaccio as an antipasto.  He had never seen it on a menu in Canada, and loved having it when staying with his Italian friends in Italy and France.  He said it was supposed to be very simple, thinly sliced raw beef that is sort of 'cooked' by sitting out for 20 minutes or so in lemon juice.  He was pretty shocked at what the waitress brought him.  There was some type of mustard-mayonaise sauce covering most of it, which he tasted then scraped away as much as he could.  There was also cheese shavings on the dish, but it was hardly recognisable to his palette which was full of the lemon marinade, lemon being the only part they got right.  Lemon and cheese?  Worst of all it was easy to tell that the beef had been laid out on the plate and then put aside in the freezer, because the slices in the center of the plate were still stone-frozen.  So after scraping away all the nasty sauce and eating the tasteless cheese, he had basically a lump of frozen lemon-beef on his plate. 

The only thing better about the main courses were that they were the appropriate temperature when they arrived.  I had what the menu calls "homemade canneloni" and Phil had chicken tortellini in alfredo sauce.  He always gets suspicious when he sees 'alfredo sauce' since it's unheard of in Italy, but he really wanted tortellini.  Phil was sure that his was cooked from frozen, as the noodle part of the tortellini was tough like out of a freezer bag that you buy at the supermarket, not soft and supple like fresh pasta should be.  The filling and sauce were equally bland at first taste, just like precooked supermarket pasta, and I could tell he was severly disappointed.  The sauce had the bland taste and texture of supermarket bagged-powdered-sauce-stuff.  When he asked the bus-girl to bring parmesan cheese so he could give the dish some flavor, she brought over a bowl of the crumbly Kraft 'parmesan' type, not real cheese, which only gave it a sandy texture, and maybe made the taste worse.  This cost $17, and he was furious on the way home that a restaurant with an Italian name would serve this. 

As for my dish, the 'homemade canneloni', I was almost as unimpressed.  My sauce was also bland, it was supposed to have sundried tomatoes, but it was just a plain tomato sauce.  I didn't let the bus-girl put the powdery 'parmesan' on my plate.  Though the menu said my dish was to have ricotta and mozarella, there was only some melted cheese on top of the canneloni, and NONE inside them.  It was basically rolled unseasoned ground meat, and dry to boot.  Not a hint of green basil inside, no cheese, onion, garlic, nothing.  At least the texture of the meat was good, but I could've got that from a hamburger.  That's basically what it was, a plain hamburger rolled in pasta instead of in a bun, tossed into a bowl with tomato sauce.  I think this cost us almost $20. 

We were pretty appalled as we went over it again and again on the way home.  Neither of our dishes had any typical Italian herbs, whether oregano, basil, rosemary, parsley or thyme.  They were ultra bland and seemed thrown together from frozen and canned stuff you get at costco.  The only part of my canneloni which was homemade seemed to be that they had stuffed the ground meat into the pasta themselves.  We are sure it wasn't the cooks having an off night or anything, because we don't believe there are true cooks working there, just $15/hour kids warming ingredients up and putting them together.  If that is how Fratelli operates, I'm sure it's no different at any of their other locations.  We haven't been more let down by a restaurant in years, and we will NEVER go back!