Don Giovanni - Italian Restaurant Manchester

It was my cousin’s 30th birthday and we had an intimate dinner here, with my family. Don Giovanni exuded an air of tranquility and beauty😍

We requested to make the dinner have a birthday feel, while booking the reservation and they reverted with suggestions. Food was goooood!!! I was so impressed and my cousin had a blast.

I gave the service a 4 because, it took a while for us to get served but that didn’t trump the awesome experience we had. Highly recommend you pay a visit and thank me later.

Absolutely fantastic experience from start to finish. The staff were genuinely 10/10 — warm, attentive, and clearly passionate about what they do. The food was just as impressive: fresh, full of flavour, and beautifully presented.

A special shout-out to one of the team who mentioned he’d never cut open a monkfish tinfoil parcel before — he did it perfectly, with total confidence, and it added a really nice personal touch to the service.

Brilliant atmosphere, amazing food, and exceptional staff. Highly recommend — can’t wait to come back.

BEYOND A JOKE

Where do I even start? What was supposed to be a  birthday dinner quickly spiralled into a complete and utter disaster.

To begin with, we were left waiting for over an hour for our food. We had to follow up ourselves to check on the status. In the meantime, we were served drinks—incorrectly, of course—requiring another round of fixes. After a solid 90 minutes, our much-anticipated “medium-rare” steaks finally arrived. That's when the real fun began and the reason I have to now break this review into a trilogy.

1) The first and most glaring issue? The steak. What was supposed to be a "medium-rare" came out looking more like a well-done. In fact, it was so overcooked it could've been used as a spare tyre for my car. They even had the audacity to bring the steak to a table behind us, cut it up, and serve it—obviously trying to hide the error. When it finally arrived, it was cold, dry, and completely inedible. We flagged this up immediately. They tried to justify it, but after reluctantly taking one bite, we called them again. A manager came over, explained it would take another hour to remake (which they didn’t even offer to do) and said they’d just “sort out the bill” at the end.

2) As if the steak wasn’t enough of a problem, we couldn’t even fully enjoy the other parts of the meal. Half of the sides were missing, and the ones that did arrive were cold and unappetising. The steak was so bad, we couldn’t even finish it. When we asked the waitresses, who had witnessed the entire thing, if they would eat the food, they just smiled and laughed. If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know, I don’t know what will.

3) The final insult? The bill. We had to argue with the manager, who graciously deducted a juicy 15% off the total, despite the fact that 90% of the food was inedible. His justification was that we "ate the food" (out of sheer hunger) and that he'd already “removed the service charge”. He also didn’t  remove the items we never received. Three attempts it took to fix the bill, and it was still wrong. Could we talk to the manager about it? Absolutely not. He just handed the third version of the bill to the waiter and walked away—apparently, dealing with us wasn’t part of his job. To make matters worse, the staff clearly saw the entire exchange and knew we weren’t in the wrong. It was painfully obvious that the real issue was the complete lack of accountability from the manager.

In summary, it was a comedy of errors and ultimately, a joke—a bad one at that.

Saturday 8pm last minute fit the 3 of us in for my lil man’s 11th Birthday 🎂 and what a perfect venue and evening it was. Lamb Shank was top tier - pizza was as expected perfectly cooked sourdough base and unlimited Parmesan on top 😉 but the focaccia and olives and dips were amazing too.
I wasn’t expecting such an elaborate decor and the DJ was amazing staff were impeccably hospitable and the manager was everywhere and looked after us so well especially with our specific food requests.
They even came round with a Polaroid for a lovely memento to take home with us.
We had the BEST dinner out in Manchester and what a location.

To the Don Giovanni family we thank and salute you.

Keep doing what you’re doing and we will be back for the “Bottomless Lasagna” next - be warned !!

❤️

Went to Don Giovanni's for Christmas dinner, now we were told to be there for 5.30 so everyone got there for 5.20 but we weren't seated till 6pm and then had to wait 30mins for the starter and then another 30mins for the mains (7pm, 1hrs after the seating time), there just wants enough staff to cater to the 50+ people and a colleague had to argue for his mains because they missed him and tried to just server him dessert, his mains came after we had all be served dessert, also had to ask repeatedly to replace the partially destroyed dessert they tried to server me, service and presentation was poor, food was good. 3 stars maybe if it wasnt the Christmas period the service would be better.

Halal Status for Giovannis - Italian Restaurant Manchester