Carmine's Pizzeria

Overpriced average Italian food and pizza.. Mostly a tourist trap.

Food was pretty decent... 3.5 stars for the penne special and the stuffed shells.  The side salad they brought out was pretty decent too, same star range.  The restaurant itself is a BYO, which is nice.  My girlfriend and I debated over the bread... she thought it was good, I thought it was bad.  The chicken noodle soup was straight out of a can, oily and with rather homogenous size/texture chicken.

The service/dining atmosphere was what really sunk this experience for me.  The outside of the restaurant smelled like rotting fish, the inside was waaay to hot, and the toilet probably has not been cleaned in 2 years.  For some reason they changed the radio station between opera, to some static-y pop station, to club music.  Random.  Also the service was inexcusably slow.  They had 4 waitresses standing around for the 2 tables being served, and yet they still managed to dilly dally and gossip with each other instead of serving us.  At one point our waitress was bringing out our salad, saw a friend and went over to go hug them, while still carrying the salad.  Instead of bringing over the check I had to go up front to ask for it, as our waitress was again chatting with friends at another table.  Oh yea, she also thought their credit card swiper was broken, after mistakenly thinking they took AMEX and kept trying to swipe my card to no avail.

Look, you could certainly do worse in terms of food quality and price, but you could also do much better.  I'd leave Carmine's as a last resort for take out/pizza, and go elsewhere if you want to sit down and eat.