Porta Di Roma — Restaurant in Dallas

Our robotics team is in town for the VEX World Robotics Championship. Nine of use chose to eat together after competition on the second day. We chose Porta Di Roma.

The not-so-good stuff - let's get this out of the way first: I called ahead to reserve space for us and was told that they were not accepting reservations. When we arrived, we were told that we could not be seated together because they had several large parties who had reserved tables. You can imagine how I felt. I found out later that the reservations were months old and were in fact reservations for robotics volunteers. The owner/manager had not communicated with the hostess regarding the large parties coming in. So they began to seat us together only to retract the seating and tell us they couldn't. VERY awkward. They did not separate our checks, nor ask if we wanted to pay separately. One of us had to pick it ALL up at the end. leaving us to square with each other later. Uncool. There are no "free" appetizers here apparently. We did receive bread AFTER our meal. And it was hot and delicious, but it did not come as an appetizer. No sweet tea. In the south. In Texas. No sweet tea. Hmm? No one offered alcoholic drinks at the beginning nor desserts at the end.

The good stuff - this is the part I like: Despite feeling like the restaurant wasn't doing much to keep our business, they asked if we were ok being seated in consecutive booths. We said yes and made it work. It turned out ok. We were served by a bustling, delightful man named Omar. He was organized and hustled to care for our needs. Our orders came out quickly and HOT. They were delicious, some of the best Italian food I've ever eaten. Outstanding! No one pushed for us to leave our tables after the meal. Omar kept refilling our drinks and conversing with us.

Summary: All in all, we would return and eat "in a heartbeat." The people were kind and worked hard. I think there were some communication problems, and I think they were struggling to keep up with the number of people in the large groups. However, the food was out of this world good, and the service was heart-felt,...

I hadn't been here in 10 years, and remembered it being fine. Well it's really gone downhill.

We decided to come here for dinner before a show at the Majestic. The show was at 8:00, so we made reservations at Porta Di Roma for 6:15. We were seated and she took our drink order right away. We asked for a minute to look at the menu and then didn't see our server for half an hour. We asked the bartender if she could find our server to take our order and she said "I'm not your server" and walked away.

Finally the server came back and we asked if she could take our order. She said no, she needed to take the order of the table that had just been sat before she could take ours (?!). Finally she took our order and then didn't come back for another half hour. We asked about our food and then she brought us bread.

After we had been at the restaurant for an hour and 15 minutes we finally got our food--conveniently right as we told her to cancel our order because we were out of time. Two tables in our section also cancelled their orders and left with no food because they were going to the same show and it was taking so long.

We scarfed down our food in 5 minutes and got the check. They automatically added 18% gratuity to our party of 4 so we didn't tip any more than that.

The food was bland and sub par. The drinks were horrible--the spritzer was extremely flat. I would never go...

There’s two locations in DFW with the same name. One in Richardson and this one in downtown. I looked up the name of the place and made the order online. I then realized that I made the order to a downtown location not a Richardson one so I called and confirmed it was not the same place despite the same name. I called to cancel my order and request a refund, if possible.

As soon as I shared the situation the man instead of just saying “no I cannot refund you” went on about explaining how “you look up the place where you order online, you look at the address before you place?, etc.” Basically being chastised.

Little did he know that I’ve been up all day looking over a friend that is going through cancer treatment over at Methodist hospital. It’s not his fault and it’s not excuse for my mistake. However, as a business owner myself being empathetic to clients or future ones is part of being human. Instead of saying “sir, I’m sorry we have a policy that says X thing about refunds” he started with “you did not check the address not my fault”

I’m not upset over the refund. I’ll try to get it disputed with my bank. But I’m upset about the poor customer focus service. He ended the call with “it’s your decision now… pick it up or not” as if I realistically would drive from Richardson to downtown for one...