Martini - Menu

Wow! We had a really good pasta ravioli here. Great service to! Jimmy Tess read more Wow! We had a really good pasta ravioli here. Great service to! Jimmy Tess

It 's a nice homely open air café/bar, managed by an efficient and friendly lady who works hard to satisfy all customers. She makes valiant efforts to conduct s... read more It 's a nice homely open air café/bar, managed by an efficient and friendly lady who works hard to satisfy all customers. She makes valiant efforts to conduct snatches of conversation with the non Italian speaking customers, and brava for that. We have been regular visitors there over a number of years when we holiday in Lucca. It offers simple pasta/salad plates and a selection of cold or hot bread based panini as well as the usual range of beverages expected of a café/bar. In the past, we have enjoyed small plates of food at lunchtimes, and in the evening pre dinner drinks before dining in one of the many splendid restaurants that Lucca has to offer. On this lunchtime visit, we had two small focaccia panini and two small bottles of water. When I went inside to pay, the lady manager said 'forty ' (Euros). I thought 'wow, that 's expensive ', but I didn 't want to make a fuss as I hadn 't checked prices before ordering. I paid over €40 and she handed me my receipt. It was only when we looked at the receipt, some way away from the café, that her linguistic error became apparent. She obviously had meant to say 'fourteen ' but mental translation prompted an incorrect 'forty ' to come out. No wonder she looked so pleased at the generous 'tip '! We accepted it as a lesson to be learned have a fair idea of what the likely charge for a service will be, before looking for the bill, to avoid unpleasant surprises. Remember, non native (insert your own native tongue here) speakers are mentally translating, and translation errors happen.