4401 Transit Rd., Williamsville, NY 14221
Web: Caffe Espresso
Phone: 716.626.2233
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Desserts Italian Williamsville
"Our desserts were simply terrible; the awful photography here, snapped with a cell phone, doesn't do justice to the miserable flavors. On a positive note, our servers were friendly."
We'll keep this entry short and sweet, both words that we wish we could use to describe our meals at Caffe Espresso, a small Italian restaurant located in the Clarence Mall Plaza portion of Transit Road's Eastern Hills Mall. While we know that friends have enjoyed this place - a fact that has compelled us to return twice - the desserts we've tried here have alternated between forgettable and unforgettably bad. The only reason we're not rating Caffe Espresso or giving it a full review is that we haven't personally sampled the rest of the menu, but after the experiences we've had here, we're convinced that we're never coming back.
Our last visit to Espresso was back in December of last year, when we stopped by to try whatever desserts and coffees the place might have on offer. At the time, we thought that the service was poor, the desserts weren't very good, and the coffee was fine - several reasons we haven't re-visited for a formal review over the subsequent nine months.
This week, we dropped in again with a simple goal: try a few desserts and find at least one that's good enough to mention in the "highs" section of a normal Buffalo Chow review. Amazingly, we were stifled in that limited task: there were only four desserts to choose from. They all looked pretty bad, like leftovers. But we plowed ahead anyway, ordering two of them and some coffee.
The coffee tasted stale and bland.
Tiramisu, an almost impossible dessert to screw up, didn't just taste like it was left over from an earlier day or week: it actually arrived smelling of vinegar. The plate, which appeared to have been drizzled with chocolate, had actually been decorated with balsamic salad dressing - a fact that one of us didn't recognize until after she'd dipped the tiramisu in it and taken an awful, sour bite. See if you could have guessed as much after looking at the close-up photo here.
To Espresso's partial credit, our server apologized and offered to give us another piece of tiramisu for free, which was done quickly, though with a decidedly smaller piece that neither of us really enjoyed. The flavor was muted, and we were still in a mild state of shock from the vinegared prior plate.
And then there was the cannoli. We agreed that it was the most disgusting we'd ever eaten, or attempted to eat. It appeared to have arrived with curds, and tasted sour and almost nauseating from the very first bite, the cheese running in glops from its sides rather than sitting as lightly chilled, smooth cream within the shell. That shell, incidentally, was as hard as brick, and stale as if it had been sitting in the display case for some time.
Our desserts were simply terrible; the awful photography here, snapped rapidly with a cell phone camera, doesn't do justice to the miserable flavors. On a positive note, our servers were friendly. If not for them, and the advertisements for It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia found in the front of the restaurant, we would never have left this place smiling; there's little doubt that after the two occasions we've had desserts here, we'd rank this place as amongst the area's very worst for sweets. Enough said.
