Roman Ristorante – Traditional Baked Lasagna with Bechamel Sauce

We’ve been getting flyers in the mail for Roman Ristorante (located on Kingsway) for a long time but we’ve never been able to try them out.  The first time we tried coming here, they wound up being closed but we made sure we kept it in mind to try eventually.  The restaurant is pretty small – at most 7 tables and, when we stopped by for take-out one night, a bit chilly.

We were hoping that the pizza at Roman would be as good as it was at Columbus Restaurant but we were fairly disappointed.  We ordered the Capricciosa which is suppoed to come with salami, ham artichokes, mushrooms, black olives, mozzarella, and edam cheese.  The crust is extremely thin and crispy (which I liked) but the toppings were a bit skimpy and I didn’t really detect any artichokes on the pizza.

The one thing that we noticed with most of the food was that there really wasn’t much flavour to it.  The Mista Salad served with tomatoes and cucumbers (you can’t see in the picture but there’s more tomatoes and cucumbers under the lettuce) was rather bland despite the aroma of their special sauce.

The Foccaccia Bread wasn’t too bad but I think I would have preferred garlic bread.

We also tried the Arrosto Pollo which is a half roasted chicken served with roasted potatoes.  We were particularly disappointed with how bland and dry the roasted chicken tasted although the potatoes weren’t too bad.

The saving grace was their Traditional Baked Lasagna topped with a béchamel sauce.

The layers of egg noodles and meat sauce were pretty good but it was really the béchamel sauce that made this dish a winner.

It reminded me a little bit like moussaka and I don’t recall having it on any other lasanga dishes that I’ve tried before.

I think if we try Roman Ristorante out again, we’ll steer clear of the pizzas and salads and grab their Traditional Lasagna.  The actually also serve another baked lasagna dish without the béchamel sauce so make sure you order the right one if you decide to try this out.

The young server that we had was friendly and talkative enough… I suppose he was trying to keep me entertained because the food took a little longer to come out than expected.

Food:  Lasagna a 4.5 / 5; the rest was 2 / 5
Service:  3 / 5

3399 Kingsway
Vancouver, BC

www.romanristorante.com