Vivaldi, San Isidro

We've been to Vivaldi on Camino Real a few times now. This is the review of our latest visit. It was a weekday night around 8pm.

The menu selection is huge with a mixture of Peruvian and international dishes. It's hard to decide what you want to try. The environment is comfortable, but feels a bit dated (as if the restaurant was a big hit and brand new looking about 10 years ago). The service was pretty bad as the waiter forgot to bring my water for about 20 minutes and I was unable to flag him down to remind him. Also it took about 10 minutes to get his attention for the check, which he forgot, and then took another 30 minutes to finally get it. Much of our total time in the restaurant was spent trying to get the waiter's attention. The restaurant had some sort of small party going on in the central room, but the restaurant was not full and there seemed to be plenty of wait staff working.

We started off by splitting a chef's salad that was supposed to be topped with quail eggs. But when it was brought out, there was only a small piece of sliced chicken egg. The quail eggs give a distinct flavor (in addition to being more healthy) and were one of the main ingredients listed in the menu. I was a bit upset that they didn't even mention the problem before brining out the salad (as if I wouldn't notice). After I brought it up to the waiter, he explained that they were out of quail eggs and he brought me a whole hard boiled chicken egg.

I had a ceviche of white scallops (conchas) and my guest had a tiradito of lenguado. The tiradito didn't quite melt in your mouth and the flavor was a bit off. The conchas were huge, but tasted like they were too old or bad in some way, they didn't have the normal sweet flavor.

The poor quality of the food and the service had us leaving very unsatisfied and unhappy. It's possible to find much better seafood in a normal (cheaper) cevicheria. While Vivaldi may serve a large menu of different foods, seafood certainly doesn't appear to be their specialty.

The bathrooms are nice, clean, comfortable and well stocked.

Quality: 7
Flavor: 6
Presentation: 6
Selection: 10
Value: 7
Environment: 7
Bathrooms: 8
Overall: 6