Gusto is a small chain of (Anglicised) Italian restaurants which started in the northwest but now have half of their 14 outlets elsewhere in the country.
We’ve been here a few times over the years, for family get-togethers, but this was the first time for lunch. What attracted us was the short, well-priced lunch menu - £17.95 for two courses. Now, it seems you have to know that the lunch menu exists, as it wasn’t offered to us and we had to ask specifically. Not a one-off either, we didn’t see any other tables offered it so, if you didn’t know, you’d just be ordering off the more expensive main menu. The cynic in me guesses that’s exactly why they don’t offer it.
Food in itself was fine. Bruschetta had finely chopped ripe tomatoes and garlic on top of a couple of slices of toast. “Italian style houmous” was advertised as having a drizzle of pesto. There was no sign of that so, in fact, nothing really “Italian style” about it - but a decent enough ordinary houmous. Good pizza – nice tomato sauce topped with a few slices of quite pokey pepperoni. And bucatini carbonara. Purists will say it’s not a proper carbonara as it contains cream. Fortunately, they don’t use much and it only just coats the pasta. And I’m not a purist anyway so thought it fine.
But the issue we had was the considerable length of time it took for both starters and main courses to come out of the kitchen. We had got to the finger tapping stage and that means it’s no-one’s idea of fun. Not a place to go on our list of regular lunch spots.
