Zia Marie Restaurant — Restaurant in Virginia Beach

tried it twice. both times were consistent as rated above. won't be going back. most dry cesar salad EVER, and still mostly tasteless after adding extra dressing. stuffed zucchini flowers (in January) were actually decent for a sissco type product. their sauce on the lasagna was also pretty good. wife wasn't a fan of her food.....at all, neither time and would rate it a 1 star. second time I had the greek salad which over filled the plate and the size of the chopped lettuce mandated cutting it up.....completely.... as it spilled off the plate a bit while doing so. took a solid 5 minutes to carefully cut up the salad. again on the flavorless and under-dressing. had to get some extra dressing to make it palletable. ordered a sausage pizza and it came out with literally 2 table spoons of sausage with some bits being dime sized and with maybe a total of 10 pieces on a 16" pie. couldn't even tase them. the waitress offered to make me another one and even the owner came over and laughed about my "sausage pizza without any sausage".....didn't offer to take it off because I had eaten 3 of the 8 slices (was starving and couldn't wait for another order after wrestling with my salad for 20 minutes). I really just wanted to get out of there. I'll never understand how they survive. wife and I chase Michelin when traveling so we know food and we know service and don't look for that from a family italian restaurant this one is worse than 99% of family italian I've been to on every level. no clue how they survive and dumbfounded by the owner's...

We were regular patrons of Zia Marie prior to their move and we left town. We returned for a memorial service and decided we would have dinner at ZM because we had missed it so much.

I know the location is probably better for business, but it has changed the entire vibe of the place for the worse.

It also seems to have impacted the food quality. The prices are more than reasonable and the portions are substantial (probably too much, tbh). I'm thinking that because of those two factors and the increased expense of rent, they have had to skimp on preparation and quality and freshness of ingredients, because they weren't what we remembered. Bread was solid to start, but things just seemed frozen or pre-prepped from there, particularly the fried items. Chicken Parm was particularly disappointing. Came out in 5 minutes which was an immediate red flag. Definitely seemed like fried from frozen or pre-prepared food reheated, and chicken didn't seem like a breast pounded thin but some kind of cutlet. It was definitely not freshly breaded and fried and tasted like it had melted shredded mozzarella not fresh. Pasta was not quality either, and was overcooked. Was my favorite dish at the old Zia Marie.

Staff, particularly greeting and seating was poor too, too inexperienced in the finer points of front of house, and seemingly chosen less for experience and more for how they looked in tight fitting black outfits.

Since we don't get down there often, we won't be back. Will try Aldo’s or another of our favorites...

Saturday September 24th we decided to do our famly dinner here at this location. We had previously tried it about 2 weeks ago and thought it was ok to try again and different dish. Anyway we ordered chicken parm which wasn’t too bad. But the chicken ala vodka chicken was horrible. It’s frozen breaded chicken nuggets. Then someone ordered chicken penne with marinara. I was given spaghetti noodles instead. And Same chicken breaded over microwaved and gross. Sent it back which the horrible waitress made it known to us she didn’t like that at all. She was mad we sent our food back after she messed it up and asked for grilled chicken said they don’t have grilled chicken. Imagine my surprise an Italian restaurant doesn’t have grilled chicken! So I asked to get the chicken they use for chicken piccata. Eeh wasn’t too bad but way over cooked. Even before we got our food the waitress next table which was empty and very close to us she was bringing our drinks and knocked over the whole tray and the glass water bottle broke and splattered all over the floor me and my daughter. Not one person apologized. Manager came to clean didn’t ask if we were ok or offer us a napkin to wipe up water all over us etc. I do NOT recommend this place at all. Rude and obliviously don’t pay attention or care about safety of their customers. Best Italian place ever is Manninos in va beach. Best chicken piccata California...