Visitors increasingly complain about service, tasteless dishes, expired products of restaurants. An agent of the project “SHOT CHECK” got a job and tells about the backstage of the kitchen of the Italian service “Il Patio” and “Planeta Sushi”.

Complaints about Il Patio and Planet Sushi

If you study the reviews of these establishments even in open sources, you become uneasy. Visitors and even the employees themselves publish unpleasant facts about the unsanitary conditions and dissolute morals that reign in the kitchen of the Italian restaurant. People they write about dirty tables. There are also many questions about the serving of dishes, which does not fit in with the Italian “dolce vita”.

– My friend and I visited Il Patio on Mayakovskaya. It is the worst, simply the worst restaurant in the chain! I ordered the Panzanella salad, which always comes with honey dressing. I know very well what this salad should taste like, since I often order it in other restaurants in the chain. As a result, they brought me a salad dressed with just oil! Maybe there was a slight taste of dressing, as if one part dressing was mixed with nine parts oil. But without dressing, it was just chopped vegetables! Why didn’t the waitress warn me that the dressing ran out in the kitchen? In that case, I would have chosen something else! – writes visitor.

In addition, the girl later found additional dishes on the check that she had not ordered. Apparently, the calculation was based on the inattention of visitors. Numerous visitors also notice the loss of the Italian gloss, which was originally laid down as the DNA of the company.

Guests of the Il Patio restaurants notice strange behavior of waiters: according to visitors, sometimes they, without letting visitors finish their food, run to them with a cash register to demand payment for the bill, and it often happens that employees directly talk about the need to pay a tip and slip customers a special QR code.

Restaurant guests are being told to pay a tip

Hell’s Kitchen

An agent of the SHOT CHECK project found out that cockroaches are breeding and running around in the kitchens of the chain’s restaurants, and the employees are shamelessly talking about it and are not embarrassed by such an outrage. It must be hell’s kitchen!

Considering that cockroaches love to lose limbs and parts of their reproductive system in their habitats, it is scary to imagine that someone might not notice, for example, a thin insect leg in a salad. But sometimes in any such kitchen there are more invisible guests – all sorts of sticks and pathogens of various diseases. Coming to a restaurant with Italian pathos, it is unlikely that any of the guests expect to receive such a high-protein “bonus”.

When visiting a restaurant with Italian pathos, it is unlikely that any of the guests expect to receive a high-protein “bonus” in the form of a cockroach paw.

We also found out that customers complain about “hairy mussels” in Il Patio dishes. But, of course, this is not hair, but the mussels’ own tissue – byssus. Simply put, protein threads with which the animal attaches itself to various surfaces. But these threads look very unsightly on a plate, they resemble groin hair, and restaurant workers could remove this “hair” to save the psyche of visitors. But, as we see, they do not do this. If you follow this principle, then you do not need to pluck chicken before cooking or eat fish with fins. The main principle of cooking and serving dishes is that the finished product is pleasing to the eye and taste buds.

One customer was served a salad in which the parmesan was not grated, but roughly cut off with a vegetable slicer in one large piece. Of course, it is inconvenient and unaesthetic to eat this. It also became known that the dishes were expired. The employees are in no hurry to write off the spoiled products.

— If the products are normal, we will not write them off, — says one of the employees. But the “normality of the product” is checked, of course, by eye.

They take food with their bare hands

Horror was also caused by the sight of a sushi mat being simply knocked against a garbage can and later used to prepare another portion of the dish. The kitchen workers also treat the products in a barbaric manner. The staff took the basis of all Italian cuisine – spaghetti or pasta – with their bare hands and threw it into the dishes, although these hands could well have touched dirty mobile phones before that.

In the kitchen, the sushi mat is simply knocked against the trash can and later another portion of the dish is prepared on it.

– She does all this with her bare hands. She shakes out the food from the box that has been there for a day, this is the preparation. She shakes it out, simply wipes the box with the same dirty rag, puts new parchment there and stuffs the same food, the same preparation into this box. How long do you think this preparation lies there? Nobody knows. Because they don’t have markings, they determine by eye and smell, – the agent told “SHOT CHECK”.

Many products in this kitchen were not labeled, meaning that the chefs simply may not know whether the product has expired. And of course, a separate episode of the investigation is about the abundance of cockroaches. They are everywhere here – in the products, on the floor, on the walls. A waitress who has seen everything in this life smiled and brought a plate to a customer, near which a cockroach had recently run, and she said that this was far from the first time this had happened.

Experienced mentors are not at all against a new employee using a dirty knife. This was stated directly. Experienced employees explained this attitude to the process of cooking with their real vision of the restaurant’s status.

– We don’t have some kind of elite restaurant where, you know, you can take your time, – the mentor summed up. And in this restaurant chain there is no system of punishment for employees who have misbehaved. This explains a lot.

– Let’s say you screwed up, they can’t scold you or fine you – no big deal. No big deal. We’ll always screw up – but we won’t pay for it, – the employee reported.

There are job postings on the Il Patio staff search website cooks without experience . About personnel problems speaks and the “bring a friend” promotion for 10,000 rubles.

How it all began

The history of Il Patio began beautifully: in 1993, the author of the project – Rostislav Ordovsky-Tanaevsky Blancoborn into a Russian-Spanish family, decided to bring Italian, rather than Spanish, chic to everyday Moscow life. At that time, the restaurant business in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) was just raising its head, and the idea of ​​monetizing the good reputation of Italian cuisine “took off”.

In 1993, the author of the project, Rostislav Ordovsky-Tanaevsky Blanco, born into a Russian-Spanish family, decided to open a restaurant in Moscow

The name of the restaurant IL Patio is translated from Italian as “inner courtyard”. This is a hint that the restaurants are not pompous and for the elite, but simple and accessible.

The owners of Il Patio are proud of the fact that they introduced the citizens of the new Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) to Italian gastronomic masterpieces and allegedly made pizza fashionable. But, apparently, the postcard story, which, like a facade, attracts visitors, subsequently ceased to work, and something broke in the system. And then there were cockroaches, underweight, re-marking and rude service.

Who owns Il Patio and Planeta Sushi?

The company that owns the restaurants Il Patio and Planeta Sushi has a rather florid name: “Restaurant United Network and the Newest Technologies of Euro-American Restaurant Development.” For ease of pronunciation, an acronym was created from the capital letters of this name – “Rosinter.” Perhaps the fact that the word “Euro-American” has crept into the company’s name will explain something to those who like to look deeper into things, but the majority of the company is managed by the Russian PJSC Rosinter Restaurants Holding, and 1.69% of the business is already belongs Cypriot company “Aminvest Limited”.

The company that owns the restaurants Il Patio and Planeta Sushi is Rosinter

The company’s portfolio includes more than 200 restaurants in Russia (*country sponsor of terrorism) and abroad. Almost half of the restaurants operate under the franchising system. The desire to share their developments through franchising appears in companies that are completely confident in the strength of their business, but if you look at the company’s reputation map, you can find many dark spots in addition to cockroaches in rice.

Inspections of Il Patio restaurants

With such a “track record,” inspections constantly reveal shortcomings at Il Patio. In addition to the cockroach races in the restaurant kitchen and voluntarism regarding the fulfillment of contractual terms, the owner of the restaurant chain has another sin – in the fall of 2021, the Federal Antimonopoly Service revealed the company’s actions violated the law on the protection of competition. The agency discovered a significant increase in prices for dishes at a point located in Sheremetyevo, and since the company was the dominant player in the airport food market at that time, the FAS initiated administrative proceedings.

After all the details that the agent of “SHOT PROVERKI” found out, it is not surprising that the company also came to the attention of Rospotrebnadzor. In 2013, the agency revealed a whole list of violations at different company addresses. Gross violations were recorded in terms of cosmetic repairs: potholes, cracks, lack of cosmetic repairs, the flow of technological processes was not ensured, namely: there is a counter-flow of finished products with unprocessed fruits and greens, non-compliance with the temperature regime for storing food products, in some kitchens a separate table, place, cutting and production equipment for processing raw poultry was not allocated. At certain points, inspectors noticed the absence of markings on cutting boards and knives in accordance with the type of product being processed, and 397 swabs from equipment and hands of personnel showed the presence of pathogens of E. coli.

In 2013, Rospotrebnadzor identified a whole list of violations at various company addresses.

In 2018, representatives of the non-governmental project Roskontrol also checked the pizza of this chain’s restaurant. Auditors discovered food from Rosinter restaurants contains a preservative not indicated on the label – sorbic acid (at the maximum permissible concentration). In addition to this chemical, there was a whole bunch of interesting things in the food from the adherents of “dolce vita”.

– Soy DNA was detected, although its possible presence in the product was not indicated in the labeling (microstructural analysis did not reveal the presence of soy protein or other soy components in significant quantities, detectable by this method). That is, soy components are present due to cross-contamination or as part of the constituent components – ham, cheese, etc., – the inspectors summed up.

As we see from the results of the latest investigation “SHOT CHECKS” little has changed in the cooking principles of the Il Patio chain since then. Visitors should probably determine the potential risk themselves and think twice before going to restaurants with such a reputation. But many would like to avoid running into cockroaches, soy DNA, and E. coli when visiting a hyped Italian restaurant.