Mamma DiSalvo's — Restaurant in Kettering

We went to Mamma DiSalvo's for Mother's Day dinner. My daughter and son-in-law had gone there a week earlier and couldn't stop raving about it. Because of their experience, they thought it would be the perfect place for Mother's Day. They made a 5:00pm reservation. We arrived right at 5:00pm and was told that as soon as the party that was seated at our table was finished, we could be seated. We could clearly see our table and the party seated there was in no hurry to leave. Another table finally opened up and they seated us there. This was 5:50pm. We were a party of 5 adults and they sat us at a small booth for 4 with a chair at the end. We told them that wasn't acceptable. The table would never have held our food. They then added a small table and extra chairs to the end of the booth. That gave us the room we needed. The salad was very good. I had the house dressing, which was excellent, it was Italian dressing, but had a vinaigrette taste. The bread was so-so. The bread was good, but had no flavor. I ordered the Penne Ziti Pomodori with chicken. It looked wonderful and I was looking forward to this dish. It was ok, not very flavorful at all. Also the chicken was overcooked and inedible. My husband ordered the lasagna. He said it was ok, but he'd had much better. The portion was very small. It was mostly sauce and cheese on top of a couple of lasagna noodles. Definitely not the portion you would expect to pay $18 for. We didn't see a lot of our server. She did take our orders, bring our drinks, bread, salads and entrees. However, others got our refills, cleared dirty plates and glasses from the table and brought to-go containers. Our server did check and ask how everything was shortly after bring our entrees, but at that point, I had only eaten some of the pasta part of my dish. When she checked on us at the end I told her that I couldn't eat the chicken and why. She proceeded to ask me why I hadn't told her earlier, so it could be replaced, but we hadn't seen her since I started eating the chicken. They did take the $2 off that was the extra charge for adding the chicken to the dish. Overall the food and service (from our server) was mediocre at best. The gratuity was automatically added to the check. We weren't thrilled about that. We just hope that the gratuity gets split between all who helped at our table and not just...

Recently ate with a large group at the request of one of the group who is long-time Kettering resident. Hate to say it but the place is way over-rated. Here are my thoughts. -while the crowd of people is lively, they have hard unpadded chairs tables crammed everywhere to the point where you end up passing arriving plates and dirty plates for the waitress. We all were employee of the day. For a group, they tack on 20% gratuity. And they tack it on to the aftertax total. Ive never seen that in any resturant worldwide. The net is a 21.45% tip. Remember we did all the dish passing. Refills were scarce.

The food, as one reviewer commented chicken parm is a test. MDs chicken parm was a giant thick hunk of breaded chicken. They give you a steak knife cuz youll need it. You should be able to cut the cutlet with the side of a fork. The meat ravioli was flavorless. Many like their rigatoni ala vodka and reviews from our group were Good for that and the meatballs. The sauce is good and probably the reason people like this place. But you can get that at Krogers. The mozzarella sticks were sad. The salad had this conflicting tastes between the tangy cheeses parmesan, blue cheese and the lettuce was minced up. Had to use a spoon to eat the lettuce pieces and the conflicting tastes give thumbs down from salad. Appetizer plates never got taken away.

Hate to say it, but Olive Garden, Jimmys, Bravo, Maggionis, Pompillios, and Tronis and almost every other place is better in food quality, taste and service. Well be back in a couple years I suspect. Well probably secretly break up into tables to avoid having to do the serving for 21.45% tip. Do you give the governer the 1.45% or the waitress? Ive always hated auto tipping and if they auto 15 or 18 that what they get vice 20. I would have upped to 20, but 21.45%.

Watch your checks at Mammas. Auto tipping is a sign you dont trust your clientel to tip. Over auto tipping is greedy and shady.

Quit looking at your register and start cooking/serving better food. Youre lucky native Daytonians ketteringians are...

I used to go here with my grandparents and loved everything about it, the food was fantastic, the atmosphere was perfect, and the staff was always friendly. That being said, my husband and I were just in there on Friday the 15th and had a terrible experience. We took into consideration that it was the day after valentines so we knew it would be busy, however we arrived 30 minutes before our reservation and were still seated 25 minutes past our reservation time, the server, who never even introduced himself, young male, black hair, probably late 20's- early 30'2 was incredibly rude, short and standoffish when he spoke to us and seemed very put out with having to wait on us. We watched him as he made our salads(they sat us at a table facing the kitchen so we saw everything) where he dropped lettuce and then picked it up with his bare hands and threw it back into our salad bowls. My husbands food, the breaded veal parm, which was still very good Ill admit, came out with foil pieces still on/in it between the chicken and the breading. Upon showing the server the foil he basically shrugged and said "oh well" and asked us what we would like to do about it. We told him that we would not be paying the listed price for it and he said he would go back and talk to his manager. We watched him, again thanks to our picture-esk seating, go back into the kitchen and start running his mouth. The manager never came out to apologize or to talk to us personally which is what we expected would happen, instead our server came back and told us that $15 would be taken off for the contaminated food and that was that. While we waited for our check to be picked up, the bus boy, who was friendly, agreed with us on how offensively impolite our server was as he cleared our plates away. The food is great, that cannot be denied, and it can be understood that accidents happen and that waits are to be expected when a place is busy, but all in all the atmosphere and interaction with the server was piss poor and I see it being a long while if at all that we...