Chef Bartolotta's passion for high-quality food and service does not go unnoticed by his customers. He told us two stories about super satisfied customers:

"There was a family from Los Angeles who came to the restaurant for the father's birthday," he recalls. "He was originally from Bari, down in Puglia. The party was comprised of multiple generations, about 10 people. Even though a number of them were from Southern Italy, they had heard I was importing a wide variety of fish from the Mediterranean—real Italian seafood. So they decided to come all the way from Los Angeles just to have the birthday dinner at my restaurant. They made a weekend of it."

"One of my Italian servers went over with the fish cart and the old man in his dialect was naming all the fish. The family was kind of surprised when the server was going over the specials and the fish care and he talked about canocchie, which are mantice shrimp. And [the father] looked at this product. 'Do you have the real canocche?' The server said, 'We do.' He said, 'No way,' and kept prodding him. The server said, 'I'll show you,' then comes into the kitchen and says, 'Paul, can I have a tray of those little conocchie?' I said, 'Sure.' He goes out onto the floor with the tray and holds these little mantice shrimp up. The guy grabs them off the plate and says, 'Ah, when I was a little boy my grandfather and I would go fishing down in Bari.'"