Many years ago, my father took me to this incredibly expensive Italian restaurant. Dinner for him, his wife and I was 800 dollars. He had hyped this place up in fairly serious manner, but it had many years since he had been there last. and he also had gone at the wife's insistence . This was the worst food I've ever had in my life. I ordered this seafood pasta dish I remember what the fuck it was called but GOD DAMN was it nasty. The shrimp had this fucking weird texture, like freshly made ricotta cheese, they just disintegrated in your mouth with absolutely no give. Like as soon as it hit your tonge, it was a creamy curdled shrimp mousse, but it was whole shrimp. I didn't eat more than 2. The entire dish tasted off, the sauce was okay it was tomato based so I just picked at that and the mussels.
How ever I look to my dads plate, He ordered a steak and pasta combination dish and the look of abject horror on his face was hysterical. He nervously went "Heya son, wanna try my steak" he then sawed a piece of the steak off and put it on my plate. It tasted like spoiled fish. I dont know how the fuck they managed it, but his steak tasted just like my seafood pasta only that a steak should not taste like seafood pasta, it was the food equivalent of your lemonade being a glass of cat piss. It was also way overdone. The pasta was a carbonara and tasted decent, but ive thrown together many 2AM desperation carbonaras and all them were better than that. His wife got classic Ciao E pepe, it was also okay.
The end of the meal was really funny in hind sight, 3 people with almost completely full plates staring ponderously at how they spent the better part of a grand on what ever the fuck that meal was supposed to be.
Though his wife gave some insight. In the time my father had gone there, all of the staff used to speak Italian and the place was run buy real Italians. But I noticed and she confirmed (she speaks Portuguese) that all of the staff wasn't speaking Italian but Portuguese. Turns out the restaurant had been bought recently and they gutted the old staff. The place closed a few months after that.