This is the first time I've had Romio's in 10 years. My wife got diagnosed with celiac disease before we moved back to Renton, which means restaurant pizza is a rare thing. So when she planned a night out, I got excited about having my favorite pizza again. I ordered sausage, bacon, Canadian bacon and pepperoni on garlic crust...and then I saw I wasn't at the $35 delivery minimum, so I ordered some cheese bread...nope, still not there. I understand that restaurants need to be able to pay their drivers, so I grimaced and ordered a side salad, which finally put me over. But finalizing my order evaporated that goodwill when I saw that there's a delivery charge tacked onto the price. Plus tip. So those 3 items wound up setting me back more than $50.
But I was excited for my pizza! It arrived in a very reasonable time, and was as pretty as any picture you'll see on a website or menu. It looked so good I put a slice on a plate with some bread and salad and took a pic to text to my wife. Then, it was time to eat!
Salad first: It was...fine. It's hard to mess up a Caesar salad. No complaints.
Cheese bread: Um. How do you make French bread and cheese taste bland? Did you not salt the bread dough? Or the oil substrate? Maybe they forgot to toss some garlic salt on top of the cheese? Whatever happened, it was utterly flavorless.
OK, it's not made to be eaten plain. I dipped it in the very generous cup of marinara, and...ew. The marinara is unbearably sweet, with almost no other distinguishable flavor. It tasted like tomato puree, dried oregano, maybe some dried basil, and sugar. Lots of sugar. I choked down the rest of my piece of bread plain and dove into the main event. Surely the spicy sausage and salty bacon will counteract some of the sweetness for a nice, balanced final dish?
Pizza: Nope. The sausage had no spice whatsoever. If it hadn't tasted vaguely porky I would've thought they accidentally gave me plain hamburger meat. There was so little bacon that I just didn't notice it at all. I barely even noticed the pepperoni. Even worse, the garlic in the crust tasted burnt and bitter, drowning out any more subtle flavors (not that I feel there were any subtle flavors, but if there were, they were buried). It was basically a cheese pizza with burnt garlic and the texture of meat without any of the flavors. I ate 2 slices and threw the rest away.
Again, this used to be my favorite pizza on the planet, and I'm not so young that 10 years would change my palette or likes and dislikes significantly. Either something changed significantly in the past decade, or this was a seriously off night. Either way, I'm not willing to gamble another $50 to find out.
