Picasso's Restaurant and Lounge
26920 Center Ridge Road
(216) 899-9119

Italian and American food. Ridiculously bad entertainment. A couple of nice dart boards in the back. Still, for all its pretenses, this is a paper napkin kind of place - at least in the lounge. This restaurant needs to mature before it gets my recommendation.

The problem with first impressions is that you only get to make one. And the first impression, the salad, was a poor one. Suffice it to say that I would never serve my guests such an uninspired bowl of torn lettuce. The entrees, however, were quite good. Especially the veal dishes.

The worst part, however, was the lack of service. To be fair, we were with a group of over thirty people - literally filling the lounge. Sadly, there was a single waitress of unexceptional ability for the entire group. To put it bluntly, the owners bit off more than they could chew with a group of our size and should never have agreed to it. They couldn't handle a group half our size, for that matter. Water was left unfilled the whole time. Bread was never replenished. Orders were so messed up that it was reduced to listening for the waitress to scream your meal over the butchered Mel Tourme music ("who had the strip steak here?"). People not only finished their meals before others were served, but some even finished their entrees before they received their side dishes! It was a zoo.

Of course, if it were a cheap meal, one could excuse such ineptness. No such luck. The entrees ranged from $11 to $15. Serving sizes were adequate, but not large. When dinner is running about $20 a head, there's no excuse for non-service. The manager or the owner, himself, should have been taking orders, refilling water, anything.