My boyfriend and I made a reservation here for a pre-orchestra dinner on 5/27/2010. We arrived at 6:00 to find the front dining room locked, and no sign explaining to proceed to the back dining room. We walked down the hall and found another entrance to the front dining room. Seeing a few people in the rear of the room, we and went in that way. The people (presumably the owners) looked at us like we had come in brandishing machine guns, and proceeded to literally push us back out the door and toward the rear dining room (which until that point, we didn't know existed), telling us that they had an emergency. Servers and hosts in the rear dining room seemed to be in a bit of a tizzy, but we managed to get from one of the servers that the air conditioning in the front dining room had broken down. He told us that he couldn't seat us, but to go back up front and see ______ (a woman), who would give us a bottle of wine. We explained that we had no idea who he was talking about, so he pointed us toward a very flustered woman who did, in fact, give us a complimentary bottle of wine, and asked us to go ""across the street."" We explained that we didn't know what she was referring to, and she told us the name of a BYOB across the street. We actually walked around the corner to La Viola instead, and had a lovely meal. We may go back to Ernesto's at some point, but the utter panic they all seemed to be experiencing at an air-conditioning failure seemed a bit over the top -- we thought someone had died in the dining room, or discovered a bomb, for heaven's sake!
more