Arcimboldi

Rating: 4

We ate dinner here in November 2023.

Beetroot, honey, pecan and basil bruschetta
Blue cheese polenta chips with buffalo sauce
Pizza: Half vegetariana, half salsiccie

We stumbled across Arcimboldi on a cold, windy Wellington night and are sure glad we did. It looks tiny from the outside, but is long and thin with most of the dining area hidden out the back, alongside their garden where we saw staff picking ingredients.

The menu is mostly Italian and everything was bellissimo. The bruschetta was innovative and all the flavours worked great together. The Fee-Rex did get a mystery, rock hard item on her piece which was disconcerting but not a deal-breaker. The polenta chips were made with blue cheese, which was a first for us. It would have been nice for the flavour of the blue cheese to be a bit stronger, and the buffalo sauce was perplexing. Not bad, certainly, but not good either. We felt compelled to eat it, but weren’t quite sure at the end whether we actually liked the sauce or not.

The pizza was marvellous. Firstly, shout out for offering a half-and-half pizza (for a modest fee) - this lets us enjoy two flavours which we really appreciate. Both were excellent. The vegetarian was no throwaway item, as it often is in other restaurants. This vegetarian could stand proudly alongside any of the other pizzas. The salsiccie had pork fennel sausage on it, which is a favourite of Business Andys. The Fee-Rex has been often unimpressed by this and was apprehensive to order it again. But Arcimboldi had the clever idea to put on just crumbled up bits of sausage meat, rather than slices of sausage. This was a huge improvement.