Romano's Macaroni Grill

Macaroni Grill if you’re not familiar is a chain restaurant comparable to Olive Garden, but the food and atmosphere are a couple notches better. My wife and I took our kids (1 and 5) for an early dinner yesterday on our way to the mall. At barely 5pm, I was surprised there were as many customers as there were. Of course there was still plenty of open seating and I appreciated that they found us a nice corner away from other tables so the kids wouldn’t disturb anyone. They have excellent bread service, square loaves of focaccia that arrive fresh from the oven after you’re seated, and they have a bottle of olive oil on each table for dipping.

We started with their bruschetta; we had wanted the roasted vegetables but were told they were having supplier problems. I’m not a huge fan of bruschetta, but it was pretty good. I like that they serve it in component form without the tomatoes already on the bread so it doesn’t get soggy. For an entrée, I went with the Snapper “Acqua Pazza”. The description from their website is “Snapper filet simmered in a white wine broth with ripe tomatoes, fresh herbs with sweet clams and gold potatoes”. It could have been served just a bit hotter, but overall it was quite good. The portion was just right and the flavors all went together nicely, I especially enjoyed the gold potatoes. My wife got the lobster ravioli. She said liked it, but that the lobster meat was a little on the dry side.

The kids menu has standard kid-friendly offerings. My son had chicken strips and fries and my daughter just ate off of our plates. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of healthy choices they had on the menu, a number of which had 500 calories or less. It’s been a while since we’ve been there; I wonder if the menu had been redone since California now mandates calorie counts on the menu. Regardless, it was nice to have a good selection of healthy choices, I’m looking forward to going back again to try something else.