PizItalia Review

After reading the reviews of PizItalia over at both Kless’s and San’s blog, I couldn’t wait to check out the 2 storey tall playground. So I asked my good friend cum ex-colleague whether she would like to bring her son there as well and we trooped over the first weekend after reading about the place. The moving dinosaur that greeted us in front of the restaurant was impressive. Pity both our children were scared of the T-rex and we couldn’t get photos of them in the eggshell next to the dino, which would have been so cute!

Moving T-rex outside restaurant

We got there around noon and it was as hot as Singapore gets. The restaurant only had a small air-conditioned area where the air con wasn’t strong enough to cool the area down. So it was extremely uncomfortable especially for my pregnant friend. Nevertheless, we sat down, fed our children lots of water and gulped lots of iced water ourselves. As you can see, the kids weren’t too happy from being hot and hungry.

Unhappy children

Seth went off to the playground first while I fed Sophia her home cooked porridge. I was surprised the food hasn’t attived by the time Sophia finished eating as even though she’s not a very slow eater, normally the food arrives before she finishes and I have to fight her to finish her own food before eating our food. Nonetheless I was glad for the time to play at the playground with her without knowing that my food is getting cold. The playground is technically a 3 storey structure but the slide started from the second storey and the third storey looked to me like just a small square area of less than 1m square leading to nothing. I wonder why they bother to creast the 3rd storey. No child was going up as far as I could tell. Also, I was surprised to find that the spongey looking “staircase” was actually rather hard.

Part of the installation was also already falling apart despite being so new.

Part of the protective foam that was supposed to cover the metal bars

And the bottom of a few spongey structures was just stapled on with the staples exposed. I do appreciate that these electronic staplers are not like our office staplers and the individual staples will not come out as easily but they just still look dangerous to me.

Staples - potentially dangerous? Perhaps not right now but in a few months or years when sufficient tiny hands have pulled on it.

The good thing about the place is the huge ball pit, which Sophia enjoyed “packing” ie picking up individual balls and putting them into baskets and S enjoyed jumping into.

Packing balls

The older kids can be dropped off and there’s supposed to be a lady outside signing them in and generally keeping an eye over them but I don’t recommend this. She is just alone there and can’t really attend to all the kids. One of the girls was complaining to everyone that she wants socks and when nobody gave her socks just went outside to look for her parents. The lady watching over the place never paid any attention to this girl and nobody stopped her from leaving the playground.

After a rather long time, S’s mummy never came to get us, which she was supposed to do when the food arrived. Even S got too hungry and went back to the dining table another 10 minutes or so later S’s mummy came to say lets leave, they forgot our order and S is too hungry. A lady who was there with her child told me that the service is really quite patch and the last time they came they waited a long time as well and they gave them the wrong bill etc. So it doesn’t sound like its a once off mistake. But of course it could be teething problems in a new establishment and maybe they just need time to improve their procedures.

Anyway toddlers’ stomachs are not made to be empty for long periods of time so we trooped over to macdonalds where Sophia had corn and a single fry which she stole from my friend’s box that was supposed to be empty. First fry in her life.

The highlight of the trip though, was when we finally left macdonalds and went out into the open. That was when I finally see a very happy girl running about holding her macdonalds balloon. That was what made the trip worth it.

Seth was happy to be out too, looking at the “boat”s docked in the distance.

All in all a good trip out. There were a few items on the menu that I was interested to try but pity we couldn’t. Hope PizItalia can sort out their service issue and do well. I think restaurants that cater for children is a great concept and as a mum I hope such establishments do well so that there will be more of such options in Singapore.