La Grolla

Z was an amazing waitress tonight, the food delicious, and wonderful patio!

This place has delicious foods. I forgot what salad I tried, but it was great. The Fettuccine Alfredo I had was the best Alfredo in the cities. The service felt rushed even though it was slow for an early dinner. Price is decent, but spendy. A great place for birthdays or anniversaries. A more upscale fancy restaurant.

I was a fan as soon as the fried noodle and scallop appetizer was served. I can go there again and again just for that. Not happy with the choices of beers — but I can understand. Everything that we ordered were great.

My sister and I stopped by here for happy hour one afternoon and we were really glad we did. Nice HH selection and the patio is really nice. We can’t wait to come back for dinner sometime.

Eaten here twice and very pleased both times, with the only negative being the crème brûlée (it had a grainy texture). Attentive staff. Reasonable price for delicious food. Good wine list. Would be great for a date place.

Cute restaurant in a revived neighborhood… seating a little tight, but still cozy… nice to almost be family style with new people. Had efficient service from a very eccentric and informative wait person… added to the ambiance! Acceptable wine list and great entrée items… we sampled a seafood pasta special, tagliatelle bolognese and cartoccio. I am a seafoodie for sure and the cartoccio with a big variety of shellfish, linguini cooked in parchment paper is now one of my all time favorite dishes… will be back for sure!

Date night, first time and no reservation. There are several bar area tables that are for walk-​ins and we were seated right away.
Ordered the salads Cesarina and Insalata Bianca. Disappointed with both, very bland.
Main course Lasagna and Farfalle Sanremo were amazing. These alone will bring us back.
Good wine list and dessert selection.
Excellent service.
Next time we will make a reservation. Bar area seating is crowded, and you may have to deal with a crowded waiting area pushing up against your space. #butts

Let me preface this with they used to do birthday desserts.
So it’s a cute, intimate Italian restaurant. You won’t go wrong with anything you order… seriously all the food is good. So let’s just get down to it.
The food:
Calamari Fritti (calamari and zucchini lightly deep-​fried served with spicy tomato sauce and roasted pepper aioli) — perfectly prepared and not heavy at all
Crab cakes (crab cakes stuffed with fresh mozzarella, red & yellow bell peppers, jalapeño and cayenne citrus sauce, served with mesculin salad) — delicious
Capasente (Mexican diver sea scallops wrapped in angel hair, lightly deep-​fried served with lobster sauce and basil oil) — AMAZING, a definite must try
Seafood platter (special) — I can’t even with this dish, if you love seafood this is definitely the way to go
Ravioli di Granchio (large ravioli stuffed with stone crab and shrimp in creamy lobster) — I’m telling you, EVERYTHING on their menu is so good, it’s hard to make decisions. This is also a good option if you like the seafood thing
Wine and lots of it — yes please
TLDR: go get yourself some good Italian food pronto

Our experience was divine! We had great, friendly service, and our food was excellent and delicious. I had the salad bianca with grilled chicken. The ingredients were fresh, flavorful, and the salad was dressed perfectly. My friend had the salmon with crab, and said it was perfectly cooked, and it was just heavenly. We would both return soon.
Gem of a spot in Saint Paul.

Italian food is a passion for me. I grew up fortunate to eat in little Italy at old small humble restaurants Angelos and Benito’s II on mulberry street La Grolla was highly recommended by family.
The fried calamari was outstanding — fresh sweet with almost a tempura delicate batter, a minimum of oil and lovely light delicate dipping sauces with smooth complimentary spices. Surprising was the addition of a few (not enough) pieces of beloved fried zucchini — also devoid of excessive oil (difficult to do).
The fresh green noodles in the Alfredo spaghetti were boiled and not stirred frequently enough. Part was a bit hard –not totally cooked. The sauce was not creamy buttery light delicate. It had too much cheese and the side order of sausage came as ground up sausage cooked in this very heavy thick Alfredo sauce. This dish was a 2. I envisioned a whole piece of sausage roasted succulent either on top or on a separate plate.
We shared a lovely light salad with Gorgonzola pears walnuts and a perfect extra light salad dressing. This was a 4. The almond cookie filled with fresh fruit and marscapone was wonderful .
Our service was good. Not great No enthusiasm
The price points were very good. The décor casual with simple elegance. We enjoyed the speakers and music. We shall be back to try customer favorites.

Wow. Simply amazing. Maybe the best meal we’ve had in some time. Malbec from Argentina was awesome. I had the Mixed Grill of seafood. It was really good. Nice atmosphere. Busy on a Monday night during a snow storm but not so loud you couldn’t talk and hear. Server was professional. Didn’t seem to appreciate my sense of humor much but she was great. We’ve been here many times. I can’t believe I didn’t review them before. A great alternative to places like Pazzalunas on a busy hockey night. Pazzalunas didn’t even answer their phone for us to cancel our reservations. Highly recommend La Grolla.

I’ve been here for about 5 times now. It’s an Italian restaurant with nice intimate setting, good place to go for a date, though I personally came here mostly for business.
1. Food: if you like Italian, it’s a good place. Always consistent in terms of quality and taste.

Calamari: was quite small in portion than what you’d get in most comparable places. It comes with deep fried veggies mixed with the actual squid.
Avocado salad with shrimp: salad they have are big in portion and can easily be a meal. This is a very healthy and good tasting salad.
All pasta meals are good, not the best in town, but one of the better ones.
2. Service: we had to ask several times if we could have some water, I wish they didn’t need to make us ask for one.
But in general, service is pleasant and somewhat faster. Not the best service but pretty good.
All in all, it has good ambience, decent food and decent service, solid ⁴⁄₅.

La Grolla is a quaint but elegant restaurant in the Summit Hill neighborhood. We ordered the bruschetta appetizer which did not disappoint and then I played it safe with a timeless classic — fettuccine Alfredo. However, it was done very well. It is a small place, so call ahead for reservations. They do have a great patio if the weather permits.

We first came here about 6 years ago and have made quite a few return visits. Had I wrote this review several years ago, it would have been much better.
The joy of a good Italian restaurant is seeing the seasonal changes of a menu, trying new exciting things, and also going back to your old stand by favorites. La Grolla seems to just be leaning on the end component of that list. Nothing ever changes. Ever. Sure, they have nightly specials, but even those seem to be in a specific rotation. I’m all for keeping those standard, best sellers on the menu at all times, but switch it up a bit beyond that.
The Cartoccio has always been hit or miss. We were here last week and I tried the special spaghetti with shrimp and mussels. The problem here, and often with the Cartoccio, is that the shrimp was cut into smaller pieces. When those pieces are cooked, and man were they ever cooked, they turn to hard rubber balls. Same with the seafood in the Cartoccio.
I’m not seeing the value here that they once had. They’ve lost their pizzazz. The passion seems to have left town and they are relying on the same stuff that wowed us years ago, but fails to do the trick today. Even the beautiful patio has lost much of its charm. It used to be a beautiful spot in the heart of Cathedral Hill with fresh exciting pastas and a bustling night scene. Now it’s a rather boring table, with uninspired service that’s adequate at best, and cheezy music pumped through broken speakers in the background.
I’ve waited quite a while now to be once again wowed by La Grolla, but it just hasn’t happened. I’m ready to move on. Maybe my opinion will change over time, but you guys go first, let’s see some change.

You know who’s «locally owned», «works to provide quality service», «sets wrongs right» and «is family»?
La Grolla, people. That’s who.
After my experience here the other night, I found myself waffling between two and three stars. On one hand, I didn’t find the service to be outright atrocious – it was abundantly clear that the guy was ‘in the weeds’ and I mostly shook off the feelings of neglect – but the food teetered between «damn, that’s tasty» good and «FUCK, IT’S A MYSTERY HAIR IN AN OTHERWISE FORGETTABLE DISH» appalling.
In fact, allow me to break down every dish individually.
(5 stars) The stuffed and fried olive appetizer was delicious. The olives they chose stood up well to the frying treatment, retaining their inherent meatiness, and they were completely devoid of grease. I was impressed by the offering and found myself wishing we’d ordered a larger size.
(4 stars) Our friend Kara ordered the puttanesca. This particular dish garnered some mixed reviews at the table but, apart from the olives, I found it to be the tastiest offering of the night. The pasta was cooked well and the large hunks of garlic in the dish gave it a lot of flavor.
(3 stars) Dita ordered the lasagna. I considered this dish to be the ‘absolute neutral’ of the night as it showcased decent flavor but lacked structural integrity in the form of extremely overcooked noodles. Edible but undesirable.
(2 stars) I ordered the tagliatelle bolognese anticipating rich flavors and rather looking forward to the house-​made fettuccine in the dish. What arrived instead was a bed of noodles covered in a meat sauce ground so fine that it was akin to eating ‘meat sand’. It was like an Italian hot dog chili, really, and its lack of texture did nothing but bog the noodles down. I ended up taking three to four bites before being completely done and cutting my losses for the night.
(1 star) Jenny’s rigatoni: I’ll be struggling to forget about this one for a while. The only thing in the entire dish that had any flavor was the noodles – yes, the noodles outshone the sauce – and they were just a hair (you’ll see what I did there soon) under al dente. All four of us were struggling to find anything in the dish until I went to take a bite and fished out a long blonde hair. Annnnnnd we were done at that point.
As you can see, the food ranked perfectly in a five star formation for me. So why am I giving this experience one star instead of the two I ended up deciding upon?
Because the number of five star «WOW THIS PLACE SO DELICIOUS THOSE OTHER REVIEWERS ARE LYING LOL» whipped up (painfully) fake reviews is downright atrocious.
If La Grolla truly worked to «provide quality service» (as the owner himself made sure to reiterate to my friend), they’d learn from poor reviews instead of attempting to bury them under a deluge of false positives.
If La Grolla «set wrongs right», they would see an opportunity to reach out to those that had less than favorable experiences and invite them to return instead of passive aggressively calling them ‘vindictive’ for voicing a legitimate consumer experience.
«Locally owned» and «family oriented» businesses are great until you realize their ethics lie at the mercy of whomever is at the helm, regardless of their level of ineptitude.
This entire experience has been nothing short of facepalm worthy.
Thank you for the less than substandard experience followed up by the healthy dose of «NO UR WRONG!!!//» response. Top notch stuff, La Grolla.

Very nice outdoor seating area — perfect for a nice summer evening. The wait staff were friendly and the drinks were poured strong; however, the food was average Italian fare:
— My wife got the tilapia and artichoke dish. The fish was cooked OK (a little over but that’s what most restaurants do) but it was drowning in wine reduction, to the point where the fish was soggy. The scalloped potatoes were pretty good (kind of of a rustic preparation).
— I ordered the prosciutto wrapped pork tenderloin. Overall a good dish but I asked for the pork medium and it came out well done, but the peppercorn sauce was nice. Highlight of my dish was the sauteed veggies (and the aforementioned strong drinks).
Our standards for Italian food are pretty high, having patronized Broder’s fairly often over the last few years, so it wasn’t a surprise that this didn’t measure up.

I’m giving an average rating on our experience because of the service.
The food was a solid 4.5 to 5 stars. The buffalo mozzarella capresé salad was lovely. The mozzarella was creamy and the tomatoes were perfectly ripe. My husband loved his seafood stew and my fettuccine with tiger prawns was wonderful. The prawns were just touch over done but the fettuccine was a perfectly al denté.
The service was 1 star. Our waitress seemed frazzled and was less than attentive. I don’t want a server to hover but I don’t like having to flag one down either. We shared the capresé salad and had to ask for an extra plate. She rattled off the specials so fast, it made my head spin. She mangled opening the bottle of wine. She seemed much more interested in another table on the patio than waiting on us.
When I am spending $ 100+ on a meal at a supposedly elegant restaurant, I expect much better.
One more thing — attention to detail. Have the cleaning staff work on the cobwebs in the corners of the dining room.

Best sautéed shrimp ever, and they are always very generous with the portions. I usually add it to a salad, and it is a great meal. This is my favorite place to go for special occasions.
Bottle of Red, Bottle of White…
Only complaint would be… is that you are pretty packed in there, but it’s much better when the patio is open…

Why did we wait so long to try La Grolla?! This place is excellent, ranking up there with Carmelo’s as our favorite Italian restaurant in the Cities.
The sea scallop appetizer is worth getting at least once for the spectacle. The perfectly cooked, fresh scallop pair and lobster sauce is special. The fried angel hair is good for presentation but not as much for eating.
Our two spaghetti dishes — puttanesca & the daily special of shrimp, arugula and cherry tomatoes — were both good. The pasta in the special was a bit too chewy but otherwise both dishes were well prepared.
All the courses including our salads and chocolate torte dessert were reasonably portioned. Not huge but plenty for a multi-​course meal. Prices likewise are very reasonable for the upscale atmosphere and quality ingredients.
We were sat 15 minutes late on a 6:15 Saturday reservation which seemed weird considering there were many open tables. Otherwise service was fast and attentive. The only other negative was the over-​priced wine menu. $ 32 for a $ 7 Mark West Pinot is gouging even for restaurant service. We splurged on a $ 60 Illahe which was wonderful and fiscally more palatable at a roughly 2x markup.
We will definitely return to La Grolla to try more of the menu! We saw many plates of a delicious looking ravioli in cream sauce being served and the fish dishes also looked wonderful.

Yummy food and great service. My only complaint is it’s a little on the upscale side so I tend to hang at the bar (which is miniature). Overall tho a cool little spot on selby!