Romans Kitchen

Rating: 2

We ate dinner here in August 2023.

Macaroni cheese burger
Chicken bites on curly fries

After an evening movie, it was 9.30 on a Wednesday when we went looking for a place to eat. After a couple of places had closed kitchens, we had some concerns. Luckily Romans Kitchen, with a menu appealing to the late night stoner crowd, was still pumping. Not pumping for dine-in, which seems to be a throwaway part of their business, but pumping for Uber eats certainly.

Everybody loves fatty fried food, but it’s surprisingly hard to serve a good, let alone a great, meal of it. Pauly’s Diner is a shining beacon showing that it can be done, but most fried eateries are poor to middling. Romans Kitchen falls into this category.

The chicken bites were a bit dry, and the sauce combination atop (mayo and tomato) was uninspired. Curly fries are a bad choice of bedding for chicken bites. It was very difficult (especially with the plastic forks provided) to get a forkful of chicken and potato together, with the curly fries spronging away and breaking under fork pressure. Getting curlies instead of regular fries was an “upgrade” for which we paid a premium, but regular chips would have been better.

The macaroni cheese burger was not good. Despite not mentioning chicken on the menu description, this is a chicken burger with a layer of macaroni cheese, not a macaroni cheese burger. The firmness of the chicken causes all the macaroni just to squish out everywhere when you bite into it, and it was falling apart left right and centre. Add to this the fact that the flavours were nothing special and you come to the conclusion that this burger was not worth the effort.