Mama Rosa's Italian Family Restaurant — Restaurant in Hampton

This was our first time eating here. We were immediately transported back to a small town, family owned restaurant when we entered. It is dark(ish) and decorated in mostly red. It just brought about a great sense of comfort and familiarity. The server was very busy, but the hostess came and took our drink order so we wouldn't have to wait. When the server came around, they were very friendly, helpful, and attentive. They knew about the menu and helped us decide between a few things. Overall, it was a great service experience. The food was absolutely amazing. We started with the calamari, which was good, but wasn't anything to write home about. It was fine. For our main dishes we ordered Chicken Bianca Al Forno. It is pasta with chicken and broccoli in alfredo sauce with melted ricotta and topped with mozzarella. It was amazing. However, they give you enough for two meals, and it didn't reheat exceptionally well (the sauce broke, and it ended up being very greasy, which is common with cream/cheese based sauces). So, visit when you're really hungry! The other meal we got was the Chicken Di Sarrono. It is pasta with chicken and sausage tossed in spicy marinera topped with basil. This dish was so good. I'm a sucker for spicy pasta, and this did it. It wasn't too spicy, but with a small sprinkling of red pepper, it was perfect. It was also big enough to share, and I took about half of it home to eat for lunch the following day. This dish did reheat perfectly (in a 350° oven for about 15 minutes) for leftovers. Each dish came with bread and a soup or salad. We both had the house side salad, which was really good. The salads had lots of olives, red onions, salami, and some cheese. It's definitely worth stopping by if you are looking for delicious, high quality,...

We read so many positive reviews for Mama Rosa’s, but we had a horrible dining experience. We made reservations for 8 pm to celebrate our daughter’s 18th birthday. Our server acknowledged our table but didn’t return to take drink orders for another 30 minutes. She had several large parties, but there were 4 other servers hanging out with no patrons in their sections. After 45 minutes with no salads, bread, or apps brought to our table, we spoke to the manager and asked if another server could assist. He sent another server. Our order hadn’t even been sent to the kitchen, so we reordered. The food ranged from mediocre (pizza) to inedible (rubbery, overcooked mussels and pasta dishes swimming in so much sauce that it was hard to find the pasta). The server didn’t charge for the garlic knots to “compensate” for us waiting an hour and a half for our food. We had hoped to celebrate our daughter’s birthday but were not even offered the option to order dessert.

The manager never came back to check on our table or acknowledge the mistakes made in our evening.

Although our new server was on top of things, the manager should have taken it upon himself to make things right. We were charged a large (8 people) party gratuity fee of 25%. We understand this is standard procedure (although most restaurants only add 20%), but our initial service experience was pretty horrible. The new server deserved a good tip, but the manager should have done more to compensate for our poor overall experience. To finish off the evening, the server called multiple times after 10 pm because she hadn’t run the credit...

Went there in 2014 when I made a visit to my elderly mother. I didn't at the time feel it was too pricey; maybe a little more expensive than Olive Garden. Not much in the way of atmosphere but everything was clean. Don't remember what my Mom got but, she enjoyed it. I played it safe and got the Spaghetti w/meat sauce figuring you can't really mess that up. What a shock! It was delicious! Best I've ever had in fact and I've spent 25 years in the restaurant business (18 of it serving Italian food). Portion size was good. I had to labor to finish mine and generally that's not a problem for me as I'm pretty much of a glutton. My Mom could not finish hers and had to get a take-home container.

Now, as to the service. The waitress dropped off menus and took her sweet time about coming back for our order. Not really friendly, actually just bland in temperament. Once we got our food, which was quickly, that was the last we saw of her. I needed extra water but our server had gone to the back and was in no hurry to get back to us. Had to ask the bartender for H2O. Later on (still no server) my mother needed a container to carry her leftovers home. The bartender got that for us too. When we left, the bartender got $5 and I gave her a buck to give to our server. If her service that day was consistently as poor as what we got that might have been her top tip. If it wasn't for our apathetic server, I'd have given somewhere between 4 and 5 stars. Hopefully, since then they have replaced this woman with no...