Nicolini's

Rating: 3

We ate dinner here in September 2026.

Garlic mushrooms
Mushroom risotto
Baked cheesecake

That’s amore! Was but one of the absolute bangers crooned by the oustanding pianist we were privleged to sit next to. The live dinner accompaniment is a dying art, and when it’s bad, it’s bad. But when it’s good, sweet heavens how good it is. The pianist was hands down the best part of the night, we exchanged a little chitchat, he even fielded a request from us (Burt Bacharach, which he absolutely killed). He was so good we left him a tip, which is unheard of for BAATFR.

That’s not amore! Is what we said about the cocktails we had tonight. Goodness gracious, they were awful. Most cocktails are fair to good. It’s rare for them to be great, and it’s rare for them to be garbage. The multi-garbage, practically unheard of. But Nicolini’s espresso martini fell squarely into the garbage camp. Described as contaiing a “special ingredient”, we could only assume this ingredient was H2O. It was baffling how flavourless this beverage was. If you wanted flavour, and that flavour to be salt, then may I recommend the margarita. It had the worst salt rim we have ever experienced. It was positively three-dimensional, absolutely encrusted with Cerebos table salt. A salted rim should be chunkier salt, and shouldn’t be a plastered layer half way down the glass. Normally we sip around the glass to ensure each mouthful has a bit of salt. Tonight we grimaced our way through one little section until there was a salt-less bit, then tentatively sipped from there. But that wasn’t the only challenge - once you got past the rim, the margarita was ghastly. A true failure across the board.

Back on a positive note, the garlic mushrooms and mushroom risotto were both well worth eating. Creamy, hot as heck, we could have done with more bread with the garlic mushrooms, but we’d be happy to eat either of those again. The cheesecake was passable.

A little more on service and ambiance. There was a breeze at our table which caused the candle to burn down at an alarming rate, threatening to drip all over our table cloth that had clearly not been changed between diners. Kudos to the wait staff for attentatively changing our our candle, but the service was slow at points. Don’t you hate it when you get given a plate as if your food is about to come out, then it’s like quarter of an hour before the food gets there? We also waited a long time to be offered dessert, even though we’d mentioned at the outset that we were saving room for dessert. If we weren’t choking down a terrible margarita we might have left before dessert was offered.

Bookings recommended.