Il Tempio di Minerva — Restaurant in Rome

Worst Service.

I visited at around 8:45PM. They were couple of empty tables. When I approached to sit one of empty table seat which was kept outside the restaurant. One of the waiter told me that the tables are booked and asked me to wait for outside for couple of minutes. I believed that and waited for about 5 minutes. No update. Then I approached another waiter and requested for a table. Then he offered me the same table which I approached earlier and he told me that there is no reservation for that table.

Here, I would like to give a hint about the earlier waiter. He is a glabrescent. If you want your night to be get spoiled, please approach him. Otherwise wait for rest of the waiters. The rest of waiters are warm welcoming, and polite. Maybe this glabrescent guy might have had some personal problem. While I was waiting for a food. I did see that he was having rough conversation with someone. I could able to understand that he was having bad day. But showing that to customers is not good. He ultimately made my night also bad.

After seated, I did also fell into tourist trap. Ordered Carbonara. Big mistake I did. They took 40 minutes to serve that. Whereas, the couple of Italian who came 10 minutes after me and sat on the next table also ordered Carbonara. But they got served within 15 minutes. This biased serving is not good. If you want to experience it, please go ahead and ruin your night in that restaurant.

For atmosphere, I gave two stars. That two stars goes to the hard work of street musician, not to this restaurant people.

This is my first time having Carbonara. So I can't judge the food. But I felt penne was undercooked.

Take home message : Best place to ruin your dinner time by paying...

We had pasta pomoderella. The taste was good, but the portion had only 2 cherry tomatoes. It was more like pasta aglio (garlic) rather than tomato pasta. I love garlic, but I also was looking for having pomodori. The service was somewhat terrible. We were guided to a table for two, our table separated from another, but the owner came in the middle. We moved to the street side and were left standing for minutes. When being ready to leave, I asked the waiter if they had a table for us or not. They were just looking helpless. Finally, the owner showed us back to the table we were at first asked to leave. It was a humiliating experience when everyone else was seated and people stared at us. To give our order we had to wait again for some time. We had two pasta pomoderella, but our dishes were brought to us minutes apart. Not good. After our plates were taken, we again had to wait until someone came to ask if we wanted to have a dessert. We asked for a check, and yes, we waited again. The owner came to ask if everything was good. When I said all that had gone wrong, his expressions revieled he was very unhappy with my feedback and he started explaining. When I said I still wasn't happy, he just asked if we wanted our check. I told him we'd been waiting for almost 10 minutes for it. And he just left without a word. Once we had the check, we again waited that we could pay for it. In the meantime, when all this happened, our original waiter was just hanging around another table and flirting very openly with a married man in front of his wife. I will...

We stopped by here as it was one of the closest places to our hotel and looked nice as we were walking around. The staff was pleasant and the facility was clean and nice, but the food was extremely lacking. The potato croquettes were completely bland and unseasoned. The carbonara was a minuscule proportion barely fit for an appetizer and had the tiniest amount of pork. The couple small chunks seemed thrown in as an after thought. The pizza was undercooked and similarly bland. The only pleasant part of it was the cold salame put on top.

I ate at several restaurants while in Rome and this was by far the worst. I'd recommend heading to the Trastevere neighborhood on the other side of town if you're looking for good food. If you really don't want to travel far and you're staying on this side of town, I'd recommend Il Sapore instead. It's a cafeteria style take out place - think Boston market-esque - but you can also eat in. Portions are large and the food was surprisingly good.

EDIT:

A month later the owner responds. The review is of the correct restaurant - looking at other responses the owner's have left, they clearly don't take criticism well. Maybe it was just an off night, who knows, but when I get food that bad, I don't give a restaurant a second chance. Since I can't reply to the reply, I'm...