075 zerosettantacinque — Restaurant in Rome

The only thing Italian about this place appears to be the staff. The menu is mainly fast food from other countries. We should have left when we saw the menu, but though that we'd try a couple of the bland sounding pizzas, to see why so many people were eating there. We soon realised that every customer around us was a foreigner who probably didn't know what good Italian food should taste like. The vegetarian pizza was dry and tasteless, with no salt in the dough even, let alone any other herbs or even a tomato base. The other pizza had a bit more taste, mainly due to the tomato base, but nothing special. EUR 8 for a small glass of bad wine is also foreign prices. The setting is a busy road, with emergency vehicles and motorcycles screaming by. Go elsewhere.

Edit in response to the owner: If locals are going there, it's probably for the international snack food that's probably as inauthentic as the pizzas we ate. How many of your Italian customers would have been to the Middle East and eaten proper hommus, I wonder? 🤔 Low prices shoudn't mean poor quality. I would rather pay more and get better food. The EUR 20 we paid for 2 pizzas was wasted money on wasted calories. We paid more at other places and got proper pizzas. Why aren't your wines, and the outrageous prices, advertised on your menu? We mistakenly assumed that the prices would align with the prices we had been paying at other venues - our fault, yes, but we weren't expecting a glass of wine to cost almost as much as the food. EUR 7 for a Spritz is standard pricing through central Rome. EUR 5-6 for a Spritz aperitivo (with snacks) is also pretty common, even in very touristy areas like around the Pantheon. You need to get out more and see what your competitors are doing. How many customers do you think prefer to sit inside when the weather is nice? The traffic noise is not within your control, but could be an issue for people who would like to talk and be heard. The one star was for the extremely poor quality food compared to price, the noisy location, and the lack of service due to there being only one waitress looking after food and one waitress looking after drinks when your restaurant was busy. The 3 stars for service was because the waitresses were friendly enough. This review has little to do with them and more to do with...

We were on our way to The Colosseum and since this was on the walking route, we stopped by for a quick bite. It was probably about 80% full in the alfresco area.

We waited for probably a good 10 mins before I went inside and tried to get attention from one of the servers so that we could at least get seated. When I finally managed to get the attention of a server, she ushered us inside where there was another seating area which was 100% empty.

We ordered a caprese and tomato salad, carbonara and a meatball spaghetti, thinking that we can't go wrong with that since we are in Italy. But we wrong and it could go wrong.

The texture of the caprese was not as fresh and smooth, the carbonara had way too much liquid and it looked like the pasta was swimming in cream sauce and the meatballs were under seasoned. It was an extremely disappointing meal and even though we attributed it to the fact that it was probably a touristy joint but still, we expected better especially since these were classic Italian dishes.

Missed out on taking any photos as they weren't appealing. Plus we were no where near done and the servers kept coming to check if they could clear our plates. If there was a crowd and they needed the table back, we could have probably understood better. But besides us, there was only 1 other table of 2 and the rest were empty.

Edit: This was definitely the correct restaurant as I have the receipt and I double checked the interior images of the space as well. It’s the caprese salad that we had and I have edited...

We'd just finished at the colosseum and forum so we were hungry and looked up nearby places. This place had a strong rating off 1800+ reviews so we took a shot and by god do I regret it. I don't particularly like laying into places but they're never going to bother improving if we don't. I am positively baffled by the high ratings for this place. The staff were friendly and spoke English but from the start, the menus were incredibly cheap looking which was kind of a red flag but we went on nonetheless. I ordered a manhattan, and despite us being just one of two tables in the place at the time it took obscenely long for the drinks to come out. When I tasted my drink it was absolutely awful. It wasn't made properly, made dry which the menu did not indicate, and worse, it had a small piece of dirt floating in it, and a dead fly stuck to the outside of the glass. Simply inexcusable sloppiness. I asked for a different cocktail, which was serviceable but mediocre. The waiter completely forgot the water we ordered. The lasagna they brought out was lukewarm bordering on cold and tasted terrible. The little starters were really poor quality too. We didn't finish the food, paid and got the hell out of there. Overall the worst restaurant experience we had in Rome. Avoid...