The Good: Clearly, this place is doing something right. The business has been astoundingly successful, from an outside viewer's standpoint, for many years longer than most all of the other area non-hotel-affiliated restaurants have been in business period, with the exceptions of Peabody's (long-established, with new ownership) and, possibly, Piatti (chain, may or may not have been in business in Montecito prior to Pan E Vino). The owner/managing partner/whatever is extremely congenial, as others have noted, and in our instance he made every effort to repair what was already an impossibly broken situation, though I might suggest that although he is ideally suited as an appeaser, he might better serve his role by preventing such issues from arising in the first place. To complete this section, I am not by any means an authority on the 'authenticity' of any Italian restaurant, as I have never traveled in Italy, but I've eaten a ton of good Italian food in the States, and have no bones to pick with what they serve up at Pan E Vino.

The Bad: Unfortunately, here in the States, we tend to view the overall dining experience as being at least equally important to the quality of the food we are presented with. As I mentioned, I am not particularly familiar with 'authentic Italian rustic' cuisine, but if it involves being served by someone who not only seems indifferent to the most rudimentary expectations of guests, but also appears to regard diners with thinly-veiled disdainful contempt, I'll have no part of it, thank you. Pan E Vino is authentic in that it employs Italian waitstaff. It wasn't a busy night (maybe 70% capacity) when our server finally graced us with her presence, but she fast conveyed the notion that we ought to consider ourselves extremely fortunate. Service is intrinsically an intangible in so many respects and responses to it subjective, but suffice to say that we did not receive good service the entire evening by our server. I suppose the tip-offs for her were, we didn't order the bottled mineral water instead of the regular still water, and I asked for the beer selection as opposed to a wine recommendation. She almost seemed to delight in telling me that the only beer available was Michelob before abruptly walking away (I began to ask her about it, out of surprise, because it was the first time in my life I'd encountered such a situation and so I was wondering why they only had Michelob available [not that I have anything against Michelob], but she apparently couldn't be bothered with addressing my question, and so off she went). From the time that she brought us the drink order until the moment the dishes arrived, not once did she return to check on us, although this was an extensively long period of time. What's more, for my brother's birthday dinner, although he had ordered a gnocchi dish off the daily specials list with a particularly-described sauce, he received-- you guessed it-- gnocchi in marinara sauce. When questioned, the server replied that the kitchen had run out of the sauce for the gnocchi on the specials menu, so they had simply elected to replace the order with gnocchi with marinara sauce. Now, every time I've been at Denny's or Carrow's and have inadvertently ordered an item they'd run out of, the server has always returned immediately to inform me and offer me the opportunity to make an alternative selection. I was amazed that Pan E Vino couldn't manage as much. As my brother said when his birthday dinner arrived (a dish varying significantly from what he'd ordered), "I could've just made gnocchi with marinara sauce at home!" Wrap Up: We were, overall, very disappointed with out most recent experience at Pan E Vino. I have no doubt that this restaurant is frequented by a loyal cadre of fans who sustain it year over year and that it takes care wonderfully of these people (many of which, I imagine, consider Coast Village Road a drive into town). For those others of you who may be considering Pan E Vino for a special occasion, I'd advise you to look elsewhere, unless, perhaps, you're planning on definitely ordering plenty of the sparkling mineral water and a $200 bottle of wine.