Caprinos Pizza Havant in Waverley

Zizzi's was fairly quiet when we visited at 7:30pm. There were a couple of lively birthday parties at the other end of the restaurant, but we were seated well away from them, which was a relief! The first minor shock were the menu prices - my calibration point used to be Pizza Express, where a "classic" pizza was between GBP10 and GBP13, whereas Zizzi only offer 3 types of "classic" pizza, and prices start at GBP13 going upwards. Pasta main courses are all GBP17 to GBP19, which genuinely did make me do a double-take. I appreciate costs for hospitality businesses have increased, but that's quite steep for a modestly-sized bowl of pasta and a minimalist portion of sauce. If I'm honest, it seems a depressing part of the "Farnhamization" of prices in the town, kick-started by Megan's charging £18 for a kebab, which seemed to start a kind of "arms race" in the town's restaurants. £18 is the new normal. It reminded me of the old "How To Be Middle Class" TV sketch - "Avocado on toast? One pound fifty? You're looking at eight pounds fifty, at least!". I had the slow-cooked beef and chiant ragu "pasta superiore", which arrived looking nothing like the picture on the menu - it was 95% pasta with a hint of sauce (although what sauce there was was delicious) and rather less generously piled-up than the photo. Yours for only GBP18.25, sir. My wife had a salmon and avocado salad (GBP17.25) which was better; decent chunk of salmon and a nicely-balanced avocado salad. The service was laughably poor; and I genuinely mean that. We ended up laughing privately at the Chuckle Brothers type mayhem! A young lady with a serious face arrived with our main courses and attempted to serve them to the people on the next table who were busy eating dessert - easy mistake to make, I know. She then approached our table and asked "Beef ragu?", so I said "Yes" - and she gave it to my wife, presenting me with my wife's salmon salad. I said (politely), "It's the other way round, actually" and the girl just walked away, still wearing the serious face. We decided to skip dessert and have coffees, whereupon the same thing happened. Despite us indicating who had ordered which type of coffee, serious-faced girl plonked each down in front of the wrong person and said "Enjoy" before turning her back and walking away. My wife whispered, "She does NOT want to be here!". We started musing over whether we should answer the wrong way round to the next dish and see if she put them in the right places! But we'd had enough, and asked for the bill. When we went to settle the bill, we asked if we could use a Zizzi gift card, to which the waitress (a different one to the backwards-dishes-serving girl) said, "How much is on it?". We replied that we didn't know, as it had been a gift to us, and could she check? No she couldn't, she said, and pointed us to a website address on the gift card, which we had to access before we could use it to pay part of the bill. Fishing out my phone, typing in the website address and then the 17-digit number from the card, the site responded "Success!" with a green tick, but didn't tell us the value on the card. Eventually the manager came over and said that he could check the card balance at the till, and that there are "two kinds of card - she thought it was the other kind". So that's that cleared up, then! Final laugh - there was a card with a QR code along with the bill, asking "How did we do? Scan the QR code to leave a Google review.". When I did that, a website asked me to log in to my Google account, then went straight to "404. That's an error. We don't know any more than that.". I tried again, this time logging into my Google account before trying the QR code - but it was 404sville again. So that was all a bit of an expensive comedy show. Add in a constantly-beeping fire alarm or security alarm in the foyer behind us, and it wasn't exactly the 'dining ambience' one would expect to go with one's £18+ bowl of pasta and £17+ salad.

Melinda was amazing! Such a lovely meal and great atmosphere 🥰

From the moment we walked in we were welcomed warmly and shown to our clean table service was very quick food with piping hot and delicious highly recommended wonderful place to eat

Really lovely Italian restaurant. The food was fresh, tasty and well-presented. And the staff were all very friendly and attentive. To start, we ordered the calamari, Caprese salad, bruschetta and the aubergine Parmigiana. Then for mains, we had the tagliatelle funghi, spaghetti milanese and the Diavola pizza. All of the dishes were really good. We would definitely come back here to enjoy the food and try some new dishes!

Delicious, authentic Italian food, very reasonably priced. Friendly atmosphere, great service.