Gennaro Ristorante

Waited 50 minutes for our food and were the only people in the restaurant. But that’s not the reason for the one star. This is honestly the worst Italian food I’ve ever had. And I’m not being specific to Edinburgh or Scotland. It has zero flavor. Food came out cold.

We had an early Sunday dinner at Gennaro’s, before the mini choir performance held at St. Giles. While I was not expecting an above average experience, I was hoping for at least decent. Super-​friendly welcome, overcompensated for its emptiness & unpopularity.
The calamari fritti was a bit tough and coated in basic pantry flour, no light crunch to be found. If fast food joints added ‘calamari’ onto their menu, this is what it’d be like. Bits over fried and patches of still raw flour taste. Served atop a bed of house salad with tomatoes; rocket; iceberg did not help the dish.
The bruschetta was a shame to its name. Below mediocre, should be taken off the menu. Hard to swallow bread, plastic cheese, unsavoury fishiness.
Pizza was closest to average of the night. Bit smaller than other restaurant pizzas and unremarkable.
Recommend sticking to just pizza and pasta, if you end up here. Average food filler.
Service was overdone to the point of being a nuisance. The server and bar man/​owner alternating every 5 – 10 mins asking if everything was alright but not actually providing any service. The hostess in her work apron smoking out front during her break, was a foreshadowing we should have heeded.
If I had to try to be fairer with a second try at this place, I would have to begrudgingly return. Walking a few mins further to any one of the many decent Italian restaurants in Edinburgh seems a worthwhile investment. as far as your tastebuds are concerned.

Amazingly cozy and friendly. I loved the busy atmosphere and the food was superb and delicious. They served this peppermint like tea with lemon, was so amazing. Their bruschetta and pasta are so mouthwatering. Dinning with them three nights in a row is something I will never regret. Keep up the great work.

Horrible service. Mediocre Italian food. Had the minestrone and linguine di frutti. Mediocre but they were the only restaurant open late. Why does everything close so early in Edinburgh? Whyyyyyy?
Whoever our server was, he must hate his job or maybe a bad day because it reflected his service toward us. Is it because we didn’t want wine instead water?

Wow — bad reviews. We split the chicken. They split it for us and subbed for a second salad. Portions were huge. And it was flavourful. Waitress had an edge, but we liked it overall. They were open late, which was a plus.

Our food was quite good. Four cheese pizza excellent. Lasagna was really tasty. Lemon sole light and fresh. asparagus chicken rich and yummy Reasonably priced. Would go again.

On a very busy Friday evening, we found ourselves with nowhere else to go than here. Quite frankly, I would rather have not eaten anything. The food was completely bland and lacking in imagination and distinctly overpriced. The service in particular was dreadful. One waiter was incredibly rude when I asked for some water when he was serving our ‘food’ and told me to shut up and not interrupt him. Terrible, don’t bother.

This Italian restaurant looks pleasant enough sat amongst lots of pubs and cafes on Grassmarket. Everywhere was mega busy with it being the start of the festival and the tattoo so to be honest this was one of few that had a table for four available inside! Inside looks really nice and at first the staff seemed quite pleasant. BUt i was very disappointed with the menu and the quality of the food. I have travelled across Italy and sampled lots of delights and always taste local italian foods in the UK being fairly new to Edinburgh we thought we would try it. My sons garlic bread was the blandest garlic bread i’ve ever tasted and mine and my husband’s bruschetta was ok and my brother in laws prawn starter he said was good although he may have just being polite as we were paying! As soon as i saw my main of veal i knew it wasn’t going to be good. The service thereafter went down hill, we had to ask for coffees and it was the worst cappuccino i have ever had! It really could be so much better with the location which is great! Won’t be going there again!

This is a place to avoid. I hardly ever say this and it pains me to say it but it’s true. All the staff may be Italian but it is the worse Italian food I’ve ever had anywhere! I’ve eaten Italian food in New York, California and Italy and this was by far the worse. The streak and mushrooms that I ordered were drenched in grease and lacked taste. To add insult to injury it is overpriced.

I just really like this place, food is pretty darn good, service is good. Have eaten there off and on for over 10 years. Always acceptable. Won’t dabble in the semantics of how authentic the food is, to me it tasted good, had fresh ingredients and was appropriately priced.

Best meal on our 4 day trip.
The fillet steak was cooked to perfection and the seafood had been seasoned for a few hours
Highly expensive but highly recommended.

I went to Gennaro Ristorante one day for dinner several months ago and I thought it was fairly average. I was cold, wet and hungry that day and would have eaten anywhere, and so I didn’t have high expectations of a fantastic meal, but I was still pretty disappointed with this place.
The outside of the restaurant looks really good and inviting, but inside I thought it was pretty dull and our tables definitely wasn’t clean. The menu offered a good choice of authentic Italian dishes including pasta and pizzas. I had a ham and mushroom pizza, which was pretty tasteless, and they skimped on the toppings and the cheese — never good. Most of the main courses are priced at around six pounds which is fairly reasonable and the portion sizes are fairly generous. I complained to the staff that my glass was dirty and they apologised and brought me a new one — which still wasn’t all that clean.
Gennaro Ristorante is a pretty average Italian restaurant, but there are much better Italian restaurants in the city which are worth visiting instead.

I visited Gennaro Ristorante about a week ago and came away feeling like it could be doing a lot better. It’s a pleasant, family-​run business which aims to provide value for money, authentic Italian food for locals and tourists alike. The staff are friendly and it offers a nice setting to relax and enjoy your meal in. We sat outside and the food didn’t take long to arrive.
The main problem was that the menu just didn’t offer anything we have all seen before. It only had the standard pizza and pasta dishes, the most adventurour of which was a mixed seafood tagliatelle. I went for the pepperoni pizza which was quite nice, although the cheese wasn’t rich enough and the sausage was a little frazzled. Our meals came to about £6.50 each, a little steep for what they were.

I have been twice to eat at this establishments and twice I have left disappointed.
No I don’t have a horror story from the place or that the service was bad. Quite the opposite our waiter on both occasions was just fine– nothing too special.
It’s that I left feeling I had a rather mediocre over priced meal. I am no great cook but I hate it when I order a meal only to be presented with something I can easily make at home for a ¹⁄₆^th of the price. I like to order stuff I usually don’t have often and I was disappointed at this place as it falls in the mediocre range of Italian restaurants. I suppose it just falls back on all the tourists it gets because of its location and doesn’t try and compete with some of the other truly excellent Italian restaurants we have in the City. However, just because you are in a tourist-​prime location doesn’t mean you should slack on your menu.
Plus the Italian song on repeat gets tiresome. The interior feels a bit tired and in need for a bit of a revamp. There are some other, better eateries in the area so I wouldn’t bother too much with this place unless something dramatic happens.

Gennaro sits amongst the pubs of The Grassmarket, and is always really busy no matter what time of day you pass. Curiosity finally got the better of me and I decided to pop in for brunch one day. I really wish I hadn’t bothered.
My meal arrived, and I knew I wasn’t going to like it as soon as I looked at it. I had the mozzarella sandwich, which I expected to come crisp and oozing with gooey cheese, and topped with some Italian tomato sauce, just as the menu had said. What I got was essentially a piece on Mozzarella as we call it here in Scotland, which was dripping with lukewarm tomato stuff which could have easily been Dolimio. I tried to get in about it with my fork and knife but the slippery bugger proved a hard task to get through. I like my cheese, but this ‘sandwich’ was literally stuff full of it to the point of being overbearing, and more than half of it lay uneaten at the side of my plate. I made some lame excuses about just having been called away for a meeting, and paid my bill and left. To have a main course as bad as that would have been hideous!
I would not recommend this place, ever. Try Mamma’s or Petit Paris a few doors away. Gennaro really needs to step up it’s game if it wants to thrive in this place.

Must say that I had higher expectations of the restaurant as I ma in general in love with Italian cuisine. The service was ok but the pizza we received was with decent size but somehow not very tasty. The tables were not very clean, we even had to ask the waiter to clean the mess of the customers who had occupied the table before us. Besides, since the weather was fab, we were a rather nig group of five and the table for four could hardly fit us in since the space around the table outside was rather small.

middling italian fare on the grassmarket. you could do much worse in the UK (think bella italia) but you could also do better. it’s a fine place to enjoy a slightly better than average italian meal on a sunny day.

Being a regular living in the grassmarket I would suggest not visiting during the month of august as attention to detail is lost, otherwise good food to be had. I had a dirty glass and floaters in my wine, I explained to the waiter who returned with a clean glass and the same floaters in my wine, which was not cork

Gennaro is a lovely little Italian restaurant situated in th Grassmarket. It serves all of the best Italian food you could expect along with a variety of other dishes. From pizza and pasta to chicken and other meats. It is reasonably priced and the quality of food is great. I would recommend it as a great place to go with friends or family for a treat. It is fairly small creating a cosy and homely environment. Staff are on hand and quick to serve and take any complaints if you were to have any (I certainly wouldn’t!) but just in case!

We headed over to Grassmarket to find the Lot in anticipation of seeing some Jazz there and just hoped to find a nice enough restaurant nearby to eat in beforehand. Not only did we find Petit Paris (Rob had been wanting to go back but wasn’t 100% sure where it was) we happened upon Gennaro Ristorante.
It was soooooo nice, we ordered a bottle of the house red and some olives before even opening the menu, only to realise once we did that they didn’t offer olives! Expecting the waiter to come back and let us know we went ahead and chose what we wanted to eat only to have him come back with a gorgeous bottle of wine and a HUGE bowl of amazing olives! Not ones to argue we dug in. The mains where lovely too, think we shared a pizza and a yummy cannelloni.
When the bill came which overall was very good value, we found out they’d only charged £2 for the olives! They had so just made up a quantity and price on the spot and we where the benefactors. Moral of the story always order olives at Gennaro’s!