Roma Ristorante Italiano — Restaurant in Tappahannock

Delicious food and great service make Roma's a winner! We're visiting Tappahannock for the week and our first visit to Roma was Sunday night. We ordered a variety of pasta dishes and a fish dish for to go. Went in and paid, got our bag of food, and we headed back to the rental unit. We were bummed to realize that our salads and bread hadn't been put into the bag. We decided to call the store and let them know what happened and see if the manager was willing to take $5 off the price of dinner. Once we got the manager on the line, he was profusely apologetic and asked that next time we place an order, to call the restaurant and let him handle the order.

We decided we enjoyed our food so much Sunday night that we wanted to try new stuff on the menu. We called Roma's and asked to speak to the manager and sat through two lengthy holds. Finally, the manager picks up and apologizes for our delay. He says they're just so so busy. We say no worries and we explain that we'd spoken to him Sunday night about missing part of our order and he immediately rembered. We told him what we wanted to order and he warned us immediately that it would be 45 minutes until our pizza would be ready. Apparently, Roma's gets busy on BOGO pizza night (Wednesday). We appreciated him giving us the timeline up front and kept the pizza in our order. We arrived at the restaurant at the designated time and are told our pizza wasn't ready yet, that it hadn't even gone in to the oven. My husband and I weren't concerned about any additional time the pizza would need because we didn't need to be anywhere else. About 5 min after we got to the restaurant to pick up food, they brought our order out in a bag, saying this was the order except the pizza. The manager asked us to look over it to confirm all items ordered were there. We looked and the order was perfect. About 5 minutes later, the manager handed me the pizza we were waiting on and I reached into my purse to get my wallet. He told me it was on him and he takes care of his customers. So, from a service perspective, ROMA absolutely goes above and beyond. I certainly hadn't expected to receive a free meal because salad and bread were forgotten on previous meal. I was surprised and thrilled with the service we received both times we've eaten here.

Now let me tell you about the food. It's DELICIOUS! The pesto sauce was amazing. The red sauce that came on my side of spaghetti is absolutely the best red sauce I've tasted. One order was a sampler and each component was cooked perfectly and the dish was delicious. The sun-dried tomato pesto pizza was divine. There was so much flavor packed into that pizza sauce. And the Flounder Del Ray was so good I got it twice. Combining both trips and eight different dishes, all eight dishes were perfect.

I HIGHLY recommend visiting Roma in Tappahannock. My family lives closer to Richmond but I envision having Roma's on regular rotation, despite the 45-60...

Someone here knows how to cook, but no one here knows how to run a restaurant. We have dined in once and taken out once. Both times the service was comically bad. Like you could Google "how to wait tables" and do a better job than they do here. When I tried to pick up take out, the woman at the register asked everyone their phone number, which was clearly not how anything was organized, then their name, again no hits, finally, what they ordered, but in ridiculously inefficient fashion. I had the honor of staring at my already-packed takeout bag while she made 6 trips for the guy in front of me over 10 minutes without once checking whether she could fulfill another order in the meantime, or even acknowledging my existence (or that of the other people waiting while she tracked down extra bread and phantom orders for one person).

The food is good once you get it, but don't ask for mods, they can't read. And don't expect it to be at temp on account of the terrible service.

The best advice I ever got when bartending was, "treat your entire section as a table." When you're working a register, everyone in front of you is your section. Surface all of the requests at once and combine trips. You'll walk less and make fewer...

I've been here a few times (there's not many choices for restaurants in this area unless you drive an hour) and I keep coming back due to the lack of choices, but it's really not worth it. The salad bar isn't very fresh, mostly consisting of wilted lettuce and a bunch of canned items dumped into serving dishes. The rest of the food choices are hit or miss. Some things are very fresh and nicely prepared, but almost everything is over priced. If you want an Italian diner and don't mind paying restaurant prices while watching Fox News, great. If you're into fine dining then the price is right but you'll be disappointed with the food quality and diner atmosphere. Service is almost always horrible due to the high turnover. You're most likely to be served by a new server who's been there for less than a month who probably won't understand the menu because it's a "foreign language". But, with that said, there's only one other Italian restaurant in town, and...