Balin Sestri Levante

Superb food. Superb service. Very reasonably priced for the quality. This would be an excellent restaurant anywhere.

We were really looking forward to our dinner at Balin for my husband's birthday innovative food, female chef... It has a pleasant ambience and great music. Our waiter was knowledgable about wine and had excellent English. We started with Italian sparkling wine and had matched wines with our courses the wine serves were rather small for the price. The antipasti were promising sashimi cut a little thick but with excellent accompanying flavours; and gyoza again with great taste combinations although not typical gyoza texture. Things went downhill from there sadly. We like our food appropriately salted. My main of pasta with vongole and beccafichi had suffered from the pasta being well salted and the salty vongole juices being reduced such that it was pretty much inedible due to excessive saltiness. My husband had a secondi of skirt steak and peppers also quite salty and a lot of gristle in the steak he gave up after a decent attempt. The desserts were sadly lacking as well pavlova with fig was actually dry meringue with fig being a Kiwi (from NZ) we know pavlova well and it should be soft and fluffy in the middle please check an Australian or Kiwi recipe; meanwhile the Basque cheesecake was an offence to the Basque people, and really just a baked cheesecake not the bruleed wonder it should have been. Chef Sara might consider a visit to the bar most famous for cheesecake in San Sebastian to taste the difference. Kudos however for comping us the pasta dish and acknowledging the excess salt. We really wanted to like Balin but the food sadly let it down and at its prices it should have been better.

The food was excellent. Elevated cuisine, inventive, well-balanced flavors, local ingredients, perfectly executed. It was our favorite meal in the area. Service is lovely and not pretentious. Location isn’t as romantic as some other restaurants nearby, but the food is so wonderful it didn’t matter.

Booked a table and was turned away because they did not care for online bookings. really disappointed, though it looked nice. what a pity!

Great.