daVinci

Let's get the good out of the way first. Restaurant daVinci serves good Italian food in a setting that...qualifies... as nice, little sterile, but nice. Most of the food is good and some excellent. My personal favorites are Verdure alla Parmigiana for appetizers and Filetto Grigliato con Polenta su Salsa di Madeira for main dishes.

What makes daVinci special for me is their Gelato - best ice-cream in this city, no questions about it. Love the Frutti di Bosco and Pistacchio. Let's not forget that I am a person who remembers the street corners in Paris, Gordes and Lucca where he had the absolute best ice-cream in the world. I could still find these places today, maybe even blind-folded.
So take my word for it - you are not gonna find better ice-cream over here.

Another enjoyable thing about daVinci is their wine-list, a lot of good wines meant for drinking over lunch and a pretty good selection of fine wines for special occasions, with almost every region of the beautiful country of Italy represented. I don't like when restaurants fill their wine list with trophy wines and can't stand when they try to make a killing with their wine offering. daVinci doesn't do either.


Now here comes the catch. daVinci is divided in half - the cafe side on the left and the a la carte side on the right. Also daVinci is one of the few places in Tallinn that has a decent pizza oven... Are you ready - you can only get pizza on the cafe side. Did you get that? OK. But this is not even the funny part, their pizza oven is located in the a la carte side of the restaurant. So if you wanted a pizza, but were told that you can't have it, you can still get a whiff and a looksy when the waiter passes your table carrying it to the cafe side.

I'm sure somebody at some point figured this to be a logical solution. Maybe they think that they will not make enough money on something that cheap like pizza on their A LA CARTE side or maybe they think that when people sit down at a table that has a cloth on it, they forget that they love pizza. I don't know.

But imagine this - you are having a fun dinner out with friends, let's say a group of eight...wait for it - plus let's say people brought their kids with them. Five of them to be exact. You think that you are going to take a chance on a Carpaccio for a starter for 150EEK, follow it with a steak with truffle sauce for 280EEK and finish with a Tiramisu for 70EEK. 150+280+70=500. And you had a good day at work and decided to award your-self with a bottle of Amarone della Valpolicella 2001 for a whopping 1425EEK. And your friends are just as hungry and also had great days at the office.
Now 500+1425=1925x8=15400EEK. I'm sure you already know where I'm going with this - kids want pizza, and who's to blame them, everybody loves pizza. What do you do? Let me remind you ...NO PIZZA. What do you do? Do you ignore the kids request? Risk having to put up with five very unhappy youngsters, who are able to ruin your night out for much less that not getting pizza for dinner? Do you relocate to the cafe side? Or do you walk out the door?

I would use the door and I have personally seen other people walk out of daVinci for the same exact reason. Well hey, I'm sure whoever made such a radical reason as refusing pizza for their clients, is probably a Marketing Guru or a Customer Service Genius or both. He or she had reasons. Reasons good enough to make 15 400 EEK's walking out the door meaningless.