Villa di Roma — Restaurant in Philadelphia

This review is for our only experience my fiancee and I had at this cozy, respectable, and classic neighborhood Italian restaurant back in JULY 15, 2023. Whenever I become fond of a place, trust me, I nearly always rate it FIVE stars here on Google. I unfortunately cannot do this for this place. I will explain on the Service paragraph. I will focus on the food part first like I believe I am supposed to.

The food was definitely delicious. Its owners are NOT wrong whenever they claim its cuisine is authentically Italian-American. Since we were already tired of gravy sauce coming down from New York City, we chose seafood instead. We started our food journey here with some cheesy garlic bread and Shrimp Scampi. It was really to die for. We accompanied them with a Peroni beer to water these down. The entrees were so much better, of course.

My fiancee ordered Chicken Lorraine with Rigatoni pasta because she saw the lady next to us eating that dish. Again, we refused gravy because we already ate it back in NYC. She was enormously satisfied with her dish. I was with mine too. I ordered a Pasta Di Linguini, which is a House favorite. I did NOT regret it at all. Like I said in the paragraph above, they DO serve authentical Italian-American cuisine. The service Ronny provided us contributed to make it more authentic, but Carol diminished everything he was striving to build with us.

Ronny is an amazingly attentive gentleman who does his best to accommodate your needs. Carol, on the other hand, seemed like she was NOT comfortable serving a Hispanic couple like us and she did not hesitate to demonstrate it. Carol wanted to rush us to order despite we had NOT read the menu. She acted like she was TOO busy to take care of us because she was conversing with the other patrons seating in front of us. When she bought us our entrees, we asked her to please take a picture of us with our meal. She refused us TWICE claiming she was "too" busy.

We expressed Mr. Pippy DeLuca, the restaurant owner, our disatisfaction with Carol. We told him we wanted to leave a tip for Ronny but NONE for her because of the way she treated us. He understood our situation and told us we did NOT have to leave a tip for the service; which really pained us because Ronny came economically undone as a result. We had to withdraw money from their in-house ATM because one must pay them in cash. That specific part of their service is still back in the era when they started. Just like the atmosphere of the restaurant.

Besides the deliciousness of the food, the atmosphere of the restaurant makes you want to enjoy their delicious cuisine right there. It definitely takes you back to the times Mr. Pippy's parents founded the restaurant. The lightning at night is appropriate for patrons to immediately feel welcomed at their restaurant. The DeLuca family, as veterans of the neighborhood, truly show you the scenes of an Italian-American restaurant. You immediately feel inside a mafia movie like The Godfather Part I (1972), Goodfellas (1991) , or The Irishman (2019). We enjoyed the ambiance even more when we ordered a Tartuffo to share with our coffee.

Despite my disatisfaction with Carol's service, I would still give this amazingly classic restaurant another try on a future visit to Philadelphia. I would just refuse Carol serving me because I do not give my business to a prejudiced individual. However, I would only ask for Ronnie to serve me some of those delicious Italian-American dishes this place has earned its reputation for. Next time, I want to try their VIlla Salad, Ziti & Meatballs, Shrimp Scampi over Linguine, Sausage Genovese, Veal Bella Bucca, Chicken Neapolitan, or a Steak My Way. All these at their...

Heads up, cash only. Gave a 1- star review for food but I only had the chance to have bread.

Came here with my boyfriend and his parents and everything except ordering two beers at the bar and the first round of drinks at our table was a bad experience. We had three hours to visit with his parents as we are visiting from out of town and two hours were spent waiting to be seated and waiting for our food which we ended up leaving before eating anything because it took forever.

We were waiting about 50 min to be seated which is fine for a Saturday night and thought it was an ok sign for good food. Three of us ordered a pasta dish and one person ordered a salad. The person who ordered a salad had it delivered about 15 min after and 5-10 min later a pasta with sausage that I ordered was THEN told to me that they were out of sausage and I needed to reorder. It took 20+ min for an Italian restaurant to realize they were out of sausage? When I reordered I let the waitress know that if the other two people’s food came out before mine that I could get mine to go so that it didn’t hold up anything and she said that it would be fine. We waited about another 25-30 min and I asked the waitress if she had an ETA on the three dishes to come and she didn’t acknowledge that we had been waiting a while and said the kitchen is very busy and she can try to find out. I mentioned that I had seen other tables that were seated after us get mussels and pasta and she said that it depended on if tables ordered apps or salads and things. She came back about 5 min later and said it would be a couple more minutes. 10 more minutes went by and we were over it and my boyfriend asked for the check and that we didn’t want the food. Another man came by, maybe a manager/owner, he didn’t introduce himself as anything, but just said the food would be out in a few minutes and asked us not to leave but had no explanation for why it was taking an 60+ min to get veal parmigiana, fettuccine Alfredo, and a baked ziti dish. We said no, we want the check.

The only thing we think may have happened was that when I had to reorder my food that our ticket went to the back of the line because we had people around us seated waaaay after us get food, including entrees and pasta. The lack of acknowledgement for the amount of time it took to have/not have food delivered was not okay, it was a terrible...

My sister and I really enjoyed our visit to Villa di Roma. We sat at the bar and enjoyed a glass of Cabernet and Peroni. We started with the escarole. It was cooked perfect and had just the right amount of garlic. We enjoyed the pasta with mushrooms and eggplant sandwich with marinara,(left off the parmigiana by choice). The food was delicious and sitting at the bar was the best way to enjoy this classic Italian restaurant. From the wagon wheel lights to the paper placemats with the map of Italy and the family pictures behind the bar, it was perfect. We met a local, Bernie, who’s heritage is from Calabria and he has imported special olive oil into the US. We shared our Calabrese and Sicilian heritage on our Mothers side with him and had a nice chat. Then we were fortunate to meet our bartender and server Epiphany also Dominic and we learned all about the family and how they all work there and grew up a few blocks away. We did not feel like we were having lunch, we thought we were visiting our Italian relatives. Love, love, love this place. 🇮🇹🍝 My sister will make this a regular spot and I can’t wait to visit again from Chicago. We did not get pictures inside. Here is one of the street. I promised Epiphany I would send him some Chicago giardiniera. It’s as good as...