It almost seems like there’s a conspiracy afoot among the city’s restaurateurs, one that we are heartily tired of. The concept is simple: put a reference to wine in your restaurant’s name, a pun is great but hey, an Italian translation is just as good; offer up a menu of bog-standard European dishes; and, if you care a little, provide a half-decent selection of wines by the glass or bottle that are actually affordable. At the moment, these places are cash cows that have punters clamoring to get a table. Now, we love wine as much as anyone, if it weren’t for one glaring issue in most of these cookie-cutter establishments—the food. DiVino isn’t the worst offender, though. Service is decent and they do offer some interesting wines at reasonable prices. Tucked in a corner of the popular Penny’s Balcony, the compact space is divided into three areas: a modern grotto-like main dining area where high tables are surrounded by glass walls filled with bottles of wine, a separate more private room occupied by one long table and an alfresco space. They keep things simple with the menu too, with just twelve items covering pastas, salads and meat dishes along with a rotating choice of around eight specials. Despite the admirable focus, most options end up being disappointing. The goat’s cheese salad with grilled chicken (B260), for example, suffers from cheese that’s obviously just come out of the fridge and very dry strips of chicken. The beef cheek with pasta (B490) is worse, with rather tough cheeks swimming in a bland casserole style gravy served next to a separate mountain of slightly dry and overcooked spaghetti. The special penne zafferano zucchini and crispy bacon (B290) is equally uninspiring with only small chunks of eggplant and little in the way of bacon. None of it is downright bad, but none of it is really worthy of the price tags either, especially when you add in little surprises like B149 bottles of sparkling water. It feels like they’re going through the motions and hoping that customers will be too busy enjoying their “wine experience” to care.
