Saltimbocca ristorante — Restaurant in Rome

Decent to average food with inconsistent service, we felt the place was a bit overrated for both food & service based on our experience. We walked in and waited in line for more than 35 mins for a table. The staff mentioned we'll have to wait for a table outdoors, restaurant seems to have a policy of putting everyone without reservation outdoors, while indoor seats were still empty. There were quite a number of empty tables indoors that were never taken throughout our entire wait + dinner until 930pm, so not sure if they were reserved or not. A few couples without reservation who waited in line for outdoor tables were eventually moved indoors after they noticed the same thing and asked for indoor seats, but they still had to wait more than 35mins in line.

We ordered spaghetti with mussels in tomato sauce and pecorino cheese grated into the sauce, taste wise it's decent but there was too much pecorino for me and the dish tasted too salty at the halfway point. Mussels had the same texture as the frozen mussels I usually cook with, it's not as tender as fresh mussels can be.

My companion had a roman margherita pizza with mozzarella, it wasn't bad but he wasn't wowed by it, he would rate it as decent tending to average.

We also had 2 cocktails - aperol spritz and a basil cocktail, both were again decent to average tasting.

My companion noticed other tables were served bread which usually comes with the cover charge, and some tables also received complimentary digestifs after their meals, while our table did not get any bread with our cover charge, and we also did not receive complimentary digestifs despite ordering 2 alcoholic drinks, 1 pasta and 1 pizza. Inconsistent service.

Restaurant gets a lot of tourists, everyone in linr were tourists when we were there. Toilet...

Picked this place because it was promoted as one of the best restaurants for saltimbocca. It was our first time trying, the meat was tender and the flavour is good. We also ordered burger there wasn't much taste to the patty but the potato chips were crispy.

Service wise, when they sat us down, we waited almost 10 minutes until a waiter came to ask us if we would like water - but the waiter didn't even come to us directly, he was sitting another couple down next to us and he asked them if they would like water straight away, and I made eye contact with him after and he then came to us and asked us for water.

When I was making the order, usually each item that I say the waiter would acknowledge it or give a nod or at least show me that they were listening or they got my order clear, but the waiter who took our order, he didn't acknowledge, no nod, just nothing, I wasn't sure if he got our order or not, or maybe he's too busy or tired, but I was just surprised with his customer service. Whilst he did get our orders right, this is just an usual customer service experience for me, first time I have experienced in a restaurant in Rome.

When we asked for the bill, another waiter served us and gave us two shots of almond-ish alcohol? He was nice and escorted us...

We found Saltimbocca from looking at reviews on Google, and went at the end of the lunch period on a Saturday. The service was quite slow, and although the drinks were served quickly, but food took a while. The cocktails were delicious and cheap. The servers were lovely and very helpful, just a bit overloaded.

To start we had the caprese salad, which was excellent. The mozzarella they use is incredibly juicy and soft, and the tomatoes were meaty. We also had a focaccia, which while tasty wasn't really focccia, it was a thin pinsa base with some rosemary and olive oil.

I had a tonnarelli cacio e pepe,which seemed to actually be a roux based sauce, it was very thick and saucy, and seemed to be a little tacky. You could tell the thickness didn't come from the pecorino romano, as the flavour wasn't that intense.

My partner, on the other hand had the seafood spaghetti which was excellent. The seafood was cooked perfectly and there was so much we couldn't finish it all. It was super fresh and there was almost more seafood than pasta. It came in a foil swan, which was sweet. We should come again but the cacio e pepe let us down slightly.

We didn't take a picture of the caprese because we had to eat it as quickly as...