Chef Tony's Fresh Seafood-Rockville — Restaurant in Maryland

I left feeling very sad. I went with my wife, child, and my wife's grandmother who had been coming for years with her husband when he was alive. She was reminiscing on the way over about the years coming here, how great the food was, and tried to order the veal cutlet as her husband always had for nearly 40 years but they dropped it from the menu and couldn't get it for her. The waiter said they didn't sell enough to justify carrying it, which is understandable.

We started with bread but one bread plate had crumbs and smudge marks from a previous patron, the other plate had a huge obvious hair wrapped around the center. They brought out two new plates. They were fine, but when I unravelled the napkin the fork had old dried green herbs or spinach wrapped around the tong of the fork. It wasn't hard but loose like it had been simply dried out and not washed. They brought the water glass with a straw for my toddler son but the glass of water they brought my wife still had the lipstick from another patron, thick enough to scrape off.

I was getting grossed out by that point, and didn't want to go to the restroom as it was surely bad. I had to take my son in there anyway, and although it was better than a gas station bathroom, you could tell they had not mopped in quite some time any more than a superficial wipe down. I'm far from ocd, and was fine living in a third world country for a couple years in the Philippines, but even they try to be clean when they can. There was no effort to be clean in the kitchen or the bathroom.

Oddly enough the restaurant itself was clean. I only looked closer because of how the night started, but the ac vents were clean, no dust on ledges, and the ceiling fans were clean. Normally those things are gross when the kitchen and bathroom are gross too. My guess is they hire someone professional to clean the main area, but not the kitchen, dishes, glasses or bathrooms.

I gave the food a try but was disappointed. The meat in the bolognese was super dry, the sauce devoid of any flavor at all, as if they forgot the spices and just threw a can of old pasty dry tomato sauce on the under cooked flavorless spaghetti like pasta. My wife's fish looked and tasted like a Denny's special at 4am. Grandma seemed to enjoy the colorful angel hair dish, but I didn't want to partake in sampling her dish. We ordered a side of broccoli for my son and it looked awesome, until you took a bite. I'm not sure how to make fresh broccoli taste like cardboard but they somehow did. My son eats all broccoli, and he just spit it out.

By the front door are some old accolade plaques from bon appetite etc, one in a wood frame but behind the glass were old dried up spiders and other assorted bugs. I understand trying to keep all the old things from the past, but there is a line on displaying dead spiders and bugs.

This may seem like a harsh review, but this is my honest experience, and the reason I was sad was that I'm sure it once was a great restaurant but obviously it's no longer what it once was, and I'm afraid there is no way it will last another decade. Old restaurants like these that are family owned for generations are something to be revered, and i'm hoping someone in their family does something to save it from disappearing.

There is hope though, as the customer service was top notch. Unfortunately it's the only positive thing going on in there, which is very sad. Poor grandpa would have been...

I am native of NJ, I have been to Southern Italy, and I am of Italian descent (no, not like Jersey Shore). After reading the scores of reviews from the last few years about this place, I was expecting some of the best Italian food in the DC metro area when I went to Amalfi. Instead, I found that Carrabba's (a chain) does a better job across the board and I think they are worth about 20/30. They were only about 75% full at 7pm on a Saturday night. At first the waiter seemed to be leaving us alone while we waited for the remainder of our party, but after three drink orders were forgotten and my water runneth dry for over 30 minutes I no longer believed that was a mistake. The waiter confirmed for me that they did not make their own pasta, but he assured me that all of the sauces were homemade. One in the party ordered the meatballs from the dinner menu, and while they charged for the dinner entree, they only brought the side meatballs (no pasta). The person who had the meatballs said they were bland, and I tried the marinara and it was actually quite terrible. Another in the party had Alfredo sauce...it was not the right thickness or creaminess. One thing this place did well was portobello mushroom gravy, but unfortunately this was incomplete since there was no tortellini available. This was especially surprising to me since the pasta is not homemade. The fried calamari was tasteless, dry, and gross. Personally, I ordered the only dish they had which used porcini mushrooms, and somehow they were not the centerpiece of the dish. In fact the mushrooms were hard to find under the red sauce and sausage they put in the pasta (if you have had porcini mushroom gravy before you may appreciate how insulting this is). Most dishes were ~$20. Cappuccino was $6 somehow. One of the few drinks they had was a Limoncello Martini...$10 but worth it compared to everything else. Final blunder...we split the check between two cards and specified the amounts for each card, but the waiter charged both amounts to the same card and then returned the two cards to the table with separate receipts despite having double swiped the one card. I do NOT...

I did enjoy some of the food and cocktails. Though there are things here I would never order again. The pastas were tasty but there were some other let-downs.

Once sitting at the table, pre-sliced bread was brought with 3 pieces of wrapped cold butter. The bread was white and bland and since the butter was cold, it was unable to spread. Along with this, we were also served three small pieces of cubed bread that had an onion and cheese topping which again the bread was bland so we just ate the cheese off the top.

For an appetizer we decided to try the small white pizza. We expected it to at least have a garlic flavor since it was the listed ingredient, unfortunately it had no garlic flavor and no flavor at all. Absolutely no one at the table like this dish and other people that did try to eat it they had to douse it in salt, parmesan, and olive oil that we had to request since it was not given to us.

Almost everyone at the table ordered the dish called meatballs. The meatballs dish is typically served with a hand made rigatoni pasta but some of us switched to spaghetti. The dishes that came out with the spaghetti pasta had very little sauce on it and I could tell that the pasta was very salty. The homemade rigatoni was not fully cooked and was a lot less salty than the spaghetti. The red sauce that was used on the pasta was very tasty and was the only thing that truly saved the dishes. The meatballs were Swedish style meatballs half pork and half beef, they were good and moist.

Another order was the chicken alfredo. Unfortunately the chicken was dry and not that great. The pasta though was tasty along with the alfredo sauce.

As for handicap accessibility, it is not accessible. The door has a step up and other spots inside have mulitple steps up. There is also no...