I had dinner here last night, and I thought it was something of a mixed bag. The focaccia (free! so that's nice) was quite good, like a puffy, cheese-less pizza. Baked ricotta with summer squash was just about perfect, although the toast it was served with was way too oily.
We very much enjoyed the artichoke side dish as well, although calling it "carciofi alla romana" is somewhat misleading, since it looks like this:
I was expecting whole artichokes (or at least one whole artichoke), not little wedges lurking under a mess of arugula. The ratio of ingredients felt off to me, overall. The seafood salad had as many beans as it did pieces of seafood.
And the eggplant parm was drowned in about a pint of (too acidic) tomato sauce, and - in my opinion - grievously under-cheesed.
Five small plates was plenty for the two of us. We ordered a dessert as well - some kind of rice pudding concoction - which I found dry-ish and overly tart and didn't feel like having more than a bite of. (Also, I was pretty stuffed.) I very much like that one can order 2/3 of a bottle of wine. I forget what it was called on the menu - some variation of "carafe."
We were seated against the wall on the far right of the room, which made it feel less like dining in a lobby. The room was packed, and very loud, with the tables very close together and hard to navigate around. Despite this, service was excellent. There's a lot of staff on the floor. Our server was knowledgeable and friendly and almost always right there when we needed him. And on the one occasion when I was looking around, trying unsuccessfully to catch his eye, a manager materialized next to me almost instantly to find out what I wanted. The proximity of other diners led to a lot of cross-table conversation - we were told by the ladies on one side of us that the coffee was fantastic, for instance.That's never happened to me before.
