Sanzone's Italian Restaurant — Restaurant in Virginia

My 80 yr old mom came over the mtn to go out & eat with me & we went here. I had a hard time picking bcz their menu is huge! THAT shoulda been a BIG red flag to me bcz you can't serve that many items & be good at ALL of them unless you have a full kitchen of chefs) I ordered a side salad that was mostly lettuce & cucumbers (& a few good slices of tomato) but it's summer & cucumbers are a summery food, cool, crisp & juicy, but these were warm & dry. We got mozzarella sticks & they also came only warm & they were brown on the outside (like when you cook in old grease) & there wasn't hardly ANY cheese in most of em! Where's the cheese? (Prob floating in the grease) You expect mozzarella sticks to be hot & gooey & cheesy but they were not. I ordered chicken parmesan sub. What I got? I don't know.The chicken wasn't BREADED & it didn't appear to have cheese on it, & the chicken was weird & flat with slices on it. I think it was what they use to put on a pizza or salads. It had the taste & texture of TOFU! My mother ordered Philly cheesesteak sub. She said hers tasted "eh, ok" but it had spaghetti sauce on it. We're from NJ/Pa & have had Philly cheesesteaks every way you can imagine BUT the difference is was the way they were cooked but they ALWAYS contained the same (magical) ingredients & spaghetti sauce was NEVER a part of the recipe! I guess if you're going to change a recipe like that (named after where it became famous) you probably should call it something else. Finally you ask why I didn't tell anyone & I would have but our waitress NEVER asked! Even wen I placed my sandwich at the side of the table after a few bites! I got a container & was going to give my food to our dogs & cat but my stomach was turning SO I didn't & i'm glad bcz I had a bad stomach all morning wen I woke up. The BEST thing I had there was the tomatoes & spending time with my mom. Sorry. My advice is you can't put up pictures of "wine country" & have vines & grapes hung all over & CALL yourself an Italian restaurant & not serve Italian food that's cooked (preferably) by Italians! These are the reasons for the 1...

Nothing worth going back a second time for...at least that I could find. I had the veal and shrimp fra diavolo ($19.95). I specifically asked the waitress if the dish came served on pasta and she told me that it did and that is also came with a side salad or a side of spaghetti and sauce. I chose the side salad with italian dressing. My salad arrived and was nothing special, plain iceberg lettuce, one olive, one pepperoncini pepper, one bland over-ripe tomato slice and two red onion rings. The dressing was nothing more than red wine vinegar. Then my fra diavolo arrived. There was no pasta; I kid you not, spaghetti sauce with three anorexic, over salted shrimp and three wafer thin pieces of about 2 inch by 3 inches pieces of veal...that was it! For $20!!! I asked the waitress where the pasta was and she told me it was either pasta or a salad. She did offer to bring me some pasta, but I declined since I wasn't sure what the additional charge would be. So I managed to eat all three pieces of shrimp AND all three minuscule pieces of veal and still had room to sop up the left over spaghetti sauce with some of the bread. The bread was okay. The sauce was not at all spicy, which is what fra diavolo means. It wasn't the worst imitation Italian food but it is far from good. Overpriced and...

The quest to continue trying out new places in the area was not good at this restaurant. The service was good though. Our waitress was everything that we had hoped she would be. The food on the other hand... not great. We got a sampler to start. Most of it was good but the chicken tenders were not a hit. I ordered the angel hair pasta with pesto and added Fried Chicken to it for $3.25. The Fried Chicken was a cheap chicken tender that was cut up and spread on top. The dish lacked flavor and a fried chicken breast that I paid for. My date had the Chicken cordon blue... it was cooked well but was obviously frozen and 100% tasteless. The sauce/gravy they put on top was a decent touch but even that had no flavor. Moving to the decor, it was dark and clammy in there. Nothing about it felt welcoming. Overall, this was a fail. If it wasn't for the waitress being nice, I would've...