La Tavernella — Restaurant in Rome

Unbelievably rude service and barely edible food. I speak passable Italian and lived in Italy for 3 years, so I do know when restaurateurs are being dickheads. Our waiter gave us no time to decide, cut us off halfway through ordering, didn’t give us bread, didn’t give us glasses for our water, no small plates for sharing our dishes, forgot an entire course, and treated us like idiots. They brought our second course AFTER offering coffee. The spaghetti all’amatriciana was terrible—not remotely spicy, exactly two tiny pieces of guanciale, and was creamy instead of tomato-y. The ravioli was undercooked and had almost no flavor. The roasted chicken (when it finally came out, after coffee) was unseasoned, dry as a bone, with oily potatoes. I don’t know if they just give foreigners something different from what they serve their Italian customers, but it was BAD. Every request was met with annoyance and flippance. I could see and hear very obviously that all the tables of Italians were being treated as anyone should, so I know it’s not just that the staff is indiscriminately rude. If you don’t speak flawless Italian so that you can tell these folks to stick it where the sun doesn’t shine, then avoid this place. This now holds the certificate of being the 4th bad meal I’ve had in all of my time in Italy—including the three years I lived in Naples. I would’ve left after the amatriciana except for the fact that I was nearly fainting with hunger and didn’t want to look around for someplace else. You’d think being so hungry would’ve made the food taste better, but you’d be wrong.

Italians take national pride in their food and making eating a pleasurable experience. When they treat you like garbage AND serve you bad food, it is a literal insult.

TL:DR—find somewhere else. This...

We've just experienced one of the worst dinings in our lifetime.

As it looked crowdy and unique we gave this restaurant a try.

At first, we've ordered half a liter of wine with half a liter of water (what was on the menu as "0,5lt.") and only got 0.375 liter of wine (and 0.5 liter of water) without any wine glasses (there were 3 water glasses already on the table). We were offered bread without a melange (oil & vinegar) as well.

The two dishes we've ordered (lasagna and pasta with mushrooms) came with a delay of 10 minutes so the first plate would have been finished (or got cold) already before the second even came in. But unfortuately it was impossible to even finish the pasta because it was just too salty. To round up this bad experience, it got worse with the lasagna. It was not tasty at all and looked like it fell off the table, it literally was a smashed combination of pasta, bolognese and cheese. As we complained at this moment, the waiter first denied that we got the wrong amount of wine and said this was a normal lasagna. Another female person was coming and explaining that the dish should be a "lasagna romana" (still not looking as any picture in our google search). She wanted to explain that we got the right amount of wine as well and gave of the very sour house wine (with wine glasses this time) as she understood she was wrong. Then she wanted to make up for the bad service/food with more of the bad food. We denied and went with paying a calculated amount of 25€ without eating up our food because we simply were not hungry any more.

The service was miserable, the food...

I have mixed feeling about this place, that’s the reason I give only 3 stars, it’s a family run business which I’m not too sure is a complete benefit for the restaurant, the attitude is very relaxed and maybe too much. The place it self is nothing special, it’s like the classical Roman tavern with very old and basic decor, I sat outside which was quite pleasant since it’s located to a very quiet street and a bit far away from the touristic area, the staff is not quite attentive to the clients and at times they got ‘too friendly’ by saying things like ‘here is the dish for this babe’… babe? Excuse me what? The food is average for a Roman taverna, nothing more nothing less, I ordered stuffed pumpkin flowers which was good, eggplant fried balls which were nothing special, as a main I got a carbonara but they ended up bringing an amatriciana which I still ate as I’m not a fan of food wasting, the amatriciana I didn’t order was good same as the one you would make home so nothing really impressive. Prices are average for the area not massively cheap not expensive. Overall I left and I wasn’t impressed by the experience and I wouldn’t go back to be honest, there are way better taverns than this for same price...