We normally enjoy Carluccio's, but I'm not so sure about this branch
We make a point of eating in restaurants up and down the scale, and we'll eat in Carluccio's maybe two or three times a year. We normally enjoy it, having developed a strategy that involves choosing only relatively simple food, like soup or starter, pasta and coffee with a glass of one of the cheaper wines. We've found we like this better than their attempts to shine with more complex and extravagant dishes or finer wines.
We'd been for a walk and arrived at a largely empty restaurant ready to eat. We don't usually expect lots of atmosphere at Carluccio's- its an "easy to keep clean" sort of place but this one seemed to have less to offer than the other branches we've eaten in. Otherwise it was the mixture as before for us, and we both ignored the persistent attempts to up-sell ( that are more intrusive than anywhere else we know) and settled for soups and pastas that we'd eaten and enjoyed in other branches. The issue here is that despite the dishes looking the same as we'd been used to, both our pastas were very much down in flavour, against our previous experience, and the focaccia served with the soups was a pale imitation of the real thing. I imagine that the recipes and ingredients are centrally controlled which I suppose means that this kitchen might not be cooking these dishes too well. Pity. We're not talking inedible here, but we would say that the food we ate here this week wasn't too interesting.