Tourists slugged with $700 bill for two plates of food in popular holiday city
An Italian restaurant is at the centre of controversy after a tourist shared a receipt showing they had been charged almost $700 for two plates of food and water.
The photo of the receipt, from Antico Caffe di Marte near Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, was first reportedly shared on Facebook.
It shows a bill totalling 429 euros (AU$694.28) for the meal of two Japanese tourists, according to Italian news outlet Corriere della Sera.
A woman, who lives in Firenze, also tweeted out the photo, saying: “Never go.” Her tweet had garnered almost 8000 retweets and 5500 likes at the time of publication.
Antico Caffe di Marte’s TripAdvisor has been flooded with negative experiences.
The restaurant, which says it serves Italian cuisine, has two stars out of five on the website.
“Our menu is clear, to pay that amount they did not just take spaghetti but also the fish that is fresh from us. The customer chooses it at the counter," restaurateur Giacomo Jin said when interviewed by Corriere della Sera.
TripAdvisor has since suspended publishing new reviews for the listing “due to a recent event that has attracted media attention and has caused an influx of review submissions that do not describe a first-hand experience”.
However, there are many reviews which do detail first-hand experiences and also recommend people do not go to the restaurant.
Some described it as a “huge ripoff” and “horrible”, with one person telling other tourists to “watch out” and “be warned”.
Claudio Pica, head of the Italian Federation of Public and Tourist Traders, said the most recent incident and those like it “greatly damages the image of Rome’s restaurateurs”, and asked for police to get involved.
Earlier this year a restaurant on the Greek island of Mykonos defended a customer’s $1350 bill for calamari, salads and beer after people called the restaurant a “trap”.
“The word ‘trap’ is not fair; not only because the prices are featured on a board next to the entrance so that everybody has an idea of the price range before entering our premises, but also because the menus and catalogs are offered to all before they order,” the restaurant said.
In August this year, one restaurant owner did not hold back when responding to negative reviews on TripAdvisor.
“Judging by the waist line of most of your party I could have served them a whole cow and they would have still left hungry,” the owner said in response to one customer who claimed their portions were too small.
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