A restaurant in Rome has attracted the ire of the internet after Japanese tourists were shocked to receive
a bill for more than €429.80 ($471) after ordering two plates of spaghetti with fish and two glasses of water.
Many more cases like this reported on Tripadvisor.
No need to travel to find crooks.
Beer vendor arrested after charging fan $724 for two beers at Miami Dolphins game
Watching the 2019 Dolphins is bad enough already
https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/beer-vendor-arrested-after-charging-fan-724-for-two-beers-at-miami-dolphins-game/
In Rome, they are notorious for practising a little fancy arithmetic. I always have to check thrice when I'm in town, I was once almost charged 30 euro for an espresso cortado, it took them about 4 tries to get the bill right :-\
An important message here -- things may be priced by weight (per etto or 100 g) rather than a fixed price per portion. Read the menu!
LauraB is correct. I noticed a lot of foods on the menu where they charged by weight. Since I was not familiar with grams, I just stayed away from those items.
The price per 100 gram approach on fish is very tricky. We seldom ordered that way as it was always more than we wanted in quantity and price. I would have thought people from other metric system countries would have been wise to that.
That the dinners were also shaken down for a tip was a shame. Clearly the restaurant was playing on the tendency to tip so prevalent in other cultures.
That restaurant has been in the news twice in the same month in two separate incidents of outrageous pricing. If you go to TripAdvisor there will be hundreds of scathing reviews mentioning the shady practices at that restaurant, some reviews going back to 2018 and earlier, so they’ve been ripping off tourists for a long time. That place is clearly a rip off restaurant there just to rip off tourists, including some Italians. Unfortunately the authorities cannot do much about it because the prices are in the menu, although in a deceiving way (per hectogram, or Hg, instead of per kg).
No need to travel to find crooks.
Beer vendor arrested after charging fan $724 for two beers at Miami Dolphins game
Including the 20% tip, isn't that what beer costs at pro games these days?
I doubt the 5,000 € fine will survive the recourse they will file for sure. The restaurant's side of the story is a little different.
Selling fish per hectogram is the most honest thing to do when the chef buys fish the same way.
In America menus often state “Market Price” for fish dishes, which is even less transparent than per hectogram.
But I wonder. If grilled fish for two was 315€ (Based on the bill) and the stated price was €6.50/Hg, that means they ate 48Hg of fish or 4.8kg (more than 10 Lb) of fish.
We’re those two Japanese some Sumo wrestlers? How can you eat all that fish?
Did the tourists pay the bill or refuse to pay?
I was in Athens, Greece back in 1985 and a restaurant tried to charge me an outrageous amount. I refused and placed what I thought was a generous amount on the table and left the restaurant, got a taxi and end of story.
The amount they wanted me to pay was about 10 times what was reasonable.
You can't defend this place. Doesn't matter what it says on the menu. We all know that if we enter a place like this (I looked it up on trip advisor, it is an average place at best) we expect to pay 20, 30 maybe 40 EUR for a meal. Then be on our way. The owners know that too. For them to come out with several kilograms of food and charge hundreds of EUR is just a total scam, period. Of course, we need to be savvy consumers too, so some shame on the tourists as well. BTW, I just looked up La Pergola in Rome. Michelin 3 star, perhaps the best restaurant in Rome. If you walk in there, you expect a huge bill. You can order 3 courses and get out of there for less than 200 EUR per person which is less than what Caffe di Marte charged those tourists.
Might want to bypass Rome for awhile:
https://www.news24.com/Green/News/fresh-health-fears-as-rome-rubbish-crisis-intensifies-20191002
I confess to being nervous about menu items priced per 100g. I know what 100g is and can do the necessary math in my head, but I'm unclear on how much edible fish there is in, say, 500 g. If the priced-by-weight fish looks like my best choice, I ask the server how much the item weighs or will cost; usually they bring the uncooked fish out to me. I have never been unpleasantly surprised when the bill was presented, but I avoid the obvious tourist-trap restaurants and any place with staff people out on the sidewalk trying to steer folks inside.
I agree that pricing by the etto is not the issue, but it appears that the restaurant is clearly misleading about how it works when they present to tourists, and by looking at the bill, likely pads the weight. As someone else mentioned, that rolls up to 4.8 Kg, or 10 1/2 pounds of fish.
Add to that the bill showed no additional charges, but somehow they bullied the pair into an additional 40 euro "Service Charge" as well as a 40 euro Tip.
True, being a bit of a savvy traveler would avoid some of this, but one shouldn't have to even be a little wise to avoid theft like this.
If grilled fish for two was 315€ (Based on the bill) and the stated price was
€6.50/Hg, that means they ate 48Hg of fish or 4.8kg (more than 10 Lb) of fish.
The article didn't say that they ate more than 10 lb of fish; that's how much was brought to the table, and I doubt that they ordered that much. That was the scam, the restaurant obviously brought them far more than a normal person would eat just to run the tab up. The price was given in hectograms; I'm sure they didn't order 48 hectograms.
BTW, for those not fluent in metric, a hectograms is 1/10 kg, 100 grams, or about 3½ oz.
When you buy fish in Italy, whether in the market or in a restaurant, you buy the whole fish. So at the market they will weigh it first, and then fillet it. So you buy the head, bones and guts as well as the bit you want to eat.
Same at a restaurant. .
Not always. With a large fish like swordfish, you buy just a "steak", a single portion of the fish. This is either in a restaurant or at the fish market.
The only time we have been overcharged in a restaurant in all our travels was at a restaurant just off Piazza Navona in Rome. We made the mistake of just sitting down for lunch without doing our research, because we had been walking all morning and were hungry. The waiter did not overcharge for my slice of swordfish, but he did pad the bill with unauthorized service charges and refused to give us a written receipt. This is the place:
https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g187791-d3598432-Reviews-La_Fraschetta-Rome_Lazio.html
Sometime in 2018 they closed, and then re-opened under a new name. I cannot tell from the reviews if they are still up to their old tricks, but I would avoid the place.
I've never heard of a hectogram until this thread!
Never heard of it either. Always see the menus stating grams (100 grams, 250 grams, whatever) until you hit a kilo. Although the liquids always seem to be in centiliters. 100 grams is close enough to a quarter pound which is a standard serving size for meat in the US.
It used to be more common that you would be shown a specific fish and it would be weighed, you were charged according to that weight, all as expected. But many times you were not served that specific fish, rather the fillets of a different fish that was not so presentable. This usually meant you paid for more fish than you got, even considering all that was not served to you anyway (head, bones, innards). This was not specific to just Italy or even Europe, it happened to me at a fish restaurant in Houston TX. It did not stay in business long.
In this case, I believe the fish was overpriced. Or the customers were overcharged. Or they completely misunderstood and thought it would be a total of the small charge for fish, not a 100 times multiple. Also, No way a 10 pound fish would be presented at most restaurants unless there was a large group of people to eat it.
I’m glad I’m contributing to the enhancement of everybody’s vocabulary.
Hectogram (Hg) is indeed an English word. The Italian equivalent (ettogrammo, or “etto”, for short) is very commonly used in Italian, especially to define food quantities. If you go to the deli to buy prosciutto, you don’t ask for 200 grams of prosciutto, but “due etti” (2 Hg).
Ten pounds of fish. Was that ten pound before cooking or ten pounds after cooking.? I suspect that they are measuring the weight before cooking as would you fish monger or local meat counter. Like a McD "quarter pounder" is before cooking. How much do you trust the resturant to charge you for the correct before cooking weight?
METRIC SYSTEM LESSON
The metric system uses Greek and Latin to define multiples and submultiples of the base. The bases are:
METER (measure of distance)
GRAM (measure of weight)
LITER (measure of volume)
Multiples use Greek:
DEKA (10)
HEKATOS (100)
KILIOI (1000)
Submultiples use Latin
DECIMUS (1/10 or 0.1)
CENTESIMUS (1/100 or 0.01)
MILLESIMUS (1/1000 or 0.001)
Therefore we have:
Kilometer, Kilogram, kiloliter (1000 times the respective base)
Hectometer, hectogram, hectoliter (100 times)
Dekameter, dekagram, dekaliter (10 times)
Meter, Gram, Liter (base)
Decimeter, decigram, deciliter (1/10 of the base)
Centimeter, centigram, centiliter (1/100 of the base)
Millimeter, milligram, milliliter (1/1000)
Also used is the etto, plural etti. An etto is 100 grammes, but is used more as an approximate measure. So if you ask for uno etto of proscuitto, you might get 110 grammes.
