Robertiello’s Italian Restaurant

Good food – not amazing. Can get boring pretty quick.
Not a big selection (especially if you only eat chicken meat-​wise).
Definitely over priced for what you are getting.
The oil dip they bring for the bread, though, is really, really good.
And they are nice, too.

We ate here tonight, my second time at this restaurant. I know Mother’s Day can put a special strain on a restaurant’s staff, but I still expect things to be pretty good. And I was partly disappointed.
I made a reservation for our party of 5 at 7 pm. We arrived a few minutes early and were seated promptly. Unfortunately, our table’s back shared a wall with their dishwashing area, where someone was enthusiastically slamming big dishwasher racks against the wall, presumably stacking them, without thinking about what the thuds were like on the other side.
It took a while to get bread on the table. We had trouble deciding what to get; two members of our party wanted clams, but they were out of them, so they had to re-​think their choices. We started to joke that bread was our reward for successfully ordering. We vacuumed it up, and then asked for more; I joked that we were a table of wolves.
I got my Diet Coke with a slice of lime, but here’s one the biggest downsides to this restaurant; they offer you soda refills, but don’t tell you that they’re going to CHARGE you for them. In an age where it costs more to wash the glassware than it does to dispense Diet Coke, that seems like a really cheesy move. We’re not talking McDonald’s here; entrees ranged from $ 13 – 19. The refill charge is not on the menu and we didn’t discover it until we got the bill and discovered that we’d had $ 12 of refills with only three people drinking soda; that’s too much on a bill that was otherwise $ 65. In fact, I may drop them a note about this issue; I am not going back because of it.
Our entrees were good. We had a Caesar salad, a steamed mussels appetizer (the 11 year old), the Porterhouse pork chop with dried cherries and Granny Smith apples (fantastic), the chicken parmagiana, and fettucini alfredo with salmon.
The salad was fresh and tasty, and an ample portion. The mussels looked and smelled fresh, and the sauce was a great sweet balance to the slightly salty shellfish. The pork chop really was the standout at the table. Unusual without being freakish, and a beautiful mélange of flavors, I may try making this at home some day. I also broke all the rules of etiquette by stealing that pork chop bone off my fiancé’s plate to suck all the teeny bits of meat from around the edges and in the crevices. What was I thinking? But MAN was it tasty! My chicken parm was competent, though we agreed that their red sauce is a bit too tangy for our tastes. The linguini that came with it was great, but I could have been happier if that pasta had had a different sauce, to serve as a contrast. Finally, the fettucini alfredo with salmon was excellent; the fish was flaky and obviously fresh, the sauce was livened up a bit with sweet onions and basil (making it not quite a true alfredo, but it’s what my 6 year old needed to call it), and the portion was giant with a generous amount of fish.
Here’s where we ran into problems. We got our food, and chowed down (we were all quite hungry), and then had all saved a corner for dessert since it was, after all, Mother’s Day and we had my fiancé’s mother and I to celebrate. Our waiter was nowhere to be found. Finally, I asked the shift manager for dessert menus, and he got them for us, and still, our waiter was off in la-​la land. We finally gave up; my fiancé got up and asked another server for our check after about twenty minutes had gone by.
We got our check and our waiter showed up a few minutes later, offering us a dessert on him. We said no thanks; it was a school night and we needed to drive all the way home to Woodinville from North Bend.
So, the service let us down, and I am really grumpy about being charged on the sly for soda refills. The food was great. Maybe we’ll try them again, but not any time soon.