Capitan Baliano - GENOVA

There is indoor and outdoor seating, I chose the later as it was a nice evening. The food and wine were good and the waiter was accommodating.

I large beer and 1 Aperol Spritz 11€. Pleasant serving staff and good view of local buildings. No antipasti with drinks. Free Wifi.

Capitan Bailano has a special place in my heart. When our kids were small we took them there whenever we were visiting Genoa. They were treated like little princes by the imposing head cook who was happy to swap minestrone for gnocchi, walnut sauce for pasta al burro etc – the boys were fussy eaters. So it is with some regret that I have to report after several changes of management this restaurant must rank as the worst eaterie not only in Genoa but on the whole peninsula. It gives a lie to the assertion you can’t get a bad meal in Italy. There is no love of food here. The interior looks like a work-in-progress, in suspense, waiting for the owners to decide whether they are pitching a bar or a trattoria or shutting it down altogether and opening a discount furniture store. Our surly waitress was one of those millennials who look when working like they’d rather be somwhere else, ideally chomping on a mechanically recovered beef patty at the nearby McDonalds. When she deigned to make eye contact she couldn’t offer any suggestions for a good local white. After what felt like an age she delivered my pasta dish, a reasonable troffie in seafood sauce but forgot the bread (something I don’t recall ever happening south of Calais) and my wife’s starter. She would have another five minutes to wait. The delay may well have been forgiven had the tagliatelle in ragu been reasonable too. Instead it can best be described as the first efforts of a reluctant student armed with a packet of supermarket value pasta, Dolmio sauce and a pan of lukewarm water. The mains were bizarre and reflected the bar-trattoria confusion : my wife opted for the Aubergines alla Parmigiana alongside Torta di Verdure more out of curiosity. The chef may have felt that all the bases were covered by putting both on the same plate and indeed a warm and well-cooked version of either component would have graced any dish by itself. However this was a case of the sum of the parts being considerably less than the parts themselves. The aubergines were of an industrial acidity and proceeded to make their presence felt for the rest of the afternoon and deep into the evening, while the vegetable cake was cold, stodgy pastry enclosing an unspecific green gloop. The microwave chef of an M6 motorway services would have hung his head in shame. An Italian-style apple pie (apples melted into the sponge) provided a faint glimmer of light in an otherwise lugubrious lunch. I can only assume the 80 euro price tag is the result of Capitan Bailano being a stone’s throw away from the church of San Lorenzo, one of Genoa’s must-see beauty spots. A miserable hiatus on an otherwise wonderful visit to the city. If you picked the name of any other restaurant in the city out of hat, I guarantee you would eat better – even McDonald’s.

Only for the pleasure of meeting the dessert will be the local value of 5 stars.

Beautiful place to get a beer and watch a football match