Ristorante Arco Di S. Calisto — Restaurant in Rome

TERRIBLE!! Tiny portions, bad food, rude waiters. Chicken all bones, no meat. Tourist trap. Very overpriced.

They have A4 paper menus folded in three, like a cheap takeaway menu. Bad first impression.

The waiter got our ORDER WRONG TWICE. He didn’t listen and lied about what we were ordering to get us served and out of there. He was clearly in a bad mood. The only restaurant in our 5-day trip where the waiters put our (tap) water and wine in front of us and didn’t let us taste the wine or pour it for us. Not a great dining experience. It was late at night and not busy, so there was no excuse for this or the rudeness.

Three antipasti platters were brought to our table when we ordered 1 between three people. The waiter wasn’t impressed when we told him we only ordered 1, and he made this known.

Main courses were incorrect for 3 of the 6 in our group. We explained what we wanted to the waiter who said he understood but brought three of the same DISGUSTING chicken dish to us. It was drenched in a horrible tomato soup with SLIMY SKIN and was MOSTLY BONE with barely any chicken. That waiter clearly was not listening and was rushing to take our order. Also, we asked for it to be changed to what we asked for (no sauce) and HE SAID NO. The menu did not say that the chicken would be drowned in sauce. It was like a stew! We had to ask for our side dishes as he forgot them. These 3 meals were left uneaten because they were INEDIBLE.

The seafood pasta was a joke. THREE MOUTHFULS OF PASTA IN A VEGETABLE STOCK (literally was stock) decorated with 2 mussels, 2 clams and ½ a langoustine with no meat in it. HORRIBLE!! The prawns were tiny too, those horrible little frozen ones. I asked was the pasta sauce tomato before I ordered and the waiter said yes. It wasn’t – it was chicken/veg stock with 3 cherry tomatoes in it. When I said it to him he pointed at a tomato and said “Yes, it is a tomato sauce”. It was not a tomato sauce!

We just wanted to get out of there so we left.

Don’t be fooled by the street ambience. This was the most expensive meal for the six of us during our trip. WASTE OF MONEY.

I would never go back to this place. TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE and we were still HUNGRY...

The room where we ate is certainly the nicest despite it being quite hot because it lacks ventilation.

The waiters (all men) were very friendly and patient with my super-broken Italian.

The choice of antipasti was not so great. It lacked vegetables and raw fish. It was our last night in Rome and wanted antipasti badly so we went for fiori di zucca and baby squids. Unfortunately both were breaded and deep fried which, though not necessarily bad, was quite heavy.

My partner chose pasta with bacon, pecorino romano, and artichokes and it wasn't the best of choices because artichokes are naturally a bit acid so this sort of kills any other flavour.

Instead of pasta, I had a secondo di carne which was beyond fabulous: tagliata con porcini. The meat was perfectly cooked (I like my meat rare and though this was medium rare the taste and texture was simply perfect). They have a wooden fire in the restaurant for their meat.

When we got my dish, it struck us that this restaurant is worth it in the whole of Trastevere precisely because of the porcini, which they exhibit in a box outside. They offer them stir fried (as antipasto), with home made pasta (as primo piatto), with the beef tagliata (as secondo piatto), and on pizza. Next time in Rome, I'll certainly visit this restaurant again to have the pizza bianca con porcini as primo, and, again, the beef steak with boletus as secondo.

As for the wine, we settled for a biodynamic Sicilian Nero D'Avola that was excellent and that had a quite interesting notice at the back: a dedication to a young Sicilian man that was killed by the...

There's a complete chaos in distributing the tables - there's no host, who should manage the queue, people just crowd at the entrance and try to catch a waiter who promises the table to anyone who's asking loud enough. Many people try to skip the line which makes everyone nervous especially in the evening when all the tourists are hungry. We took prosciutto and melon as a starter and tagliata and a seabass with artichokes and potatoes. Prosciutto was with the skin - which is usually removed, but here it was cut all together, the skin is inedible and hard. Tagliata was absolutely terrible and my Italian friend was very dissapointed, meat was suspicious and he had a stomach ache the whole evening and even the next morning. The seabass was bland, even without salt. Potatos were half raw (the waiter admitted it). Artichokes were fully burnt and I couldn't even chew them. They were not crusty as they should be if they were fried. They were just black and I tried to eat them, but couldn't even swallow - it's like a chewing gum, but harder. Had to return the dish. The whole service is extremely slow and it's a big trouble to catch attention of the waiter. The tables and chairs outside are placed on a tilted surface, so they constantly start only on 3 legs and you can't sit comfortably. Moreover there are open electrical sockets hanging from the "ceiling" which are used by the lamps - it's against safety rules. Also the waiter didn't bring a fork, and getting his attention was absolutely impossible, so we had to get up and find the fork ourselves. Totally...