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Tourist landed with £380 bill for two plates of food in Rome

Yahoo Style UK team
empty restaurant tables in the street of Rome. Italy
Tourists claim they were scammed by a restaurant in Rome, Italy. [Photo: Getty]

An Italian restaurant is at the centre of controversy after a tourist shared a receipt showing they had been charged almost £380 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 (£380) 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.

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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.

Two Japanese tourists paid almost $700 for their food at Rome restaurant Antico Caffe di Marte (right). On the left is their receipt.
Two Japanese tourists paid almost $700 for their food at Rome restaurant Antico Caffe di Marte. Source: Twitter/@harukon_et

“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.

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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.

But this customer isn’t always right. In February this year, a restaurant owner gave a brilliant response to a customer complaint.

Hitting back at his “personal attack” they took to Twitter to write “the customer is always right… unless they are very very rude and very very wrong” before sharing both the customer’s email and their response.