Bread (2*): A wonderful homemade bread selection, with some of the best breads I’d had in Rome! Unfortunately, they didn’t provide any butter/oil.
Pasta Amatriciana (0*): A very, nice dish, but not anywhere near exceptional. The tomato sauce was quite good and very fresh, but not cooked enough. It seems they threw out the melted fat from cooking the guanciale, since this dish definitely lacked/needed more fat. They chose a different style of pasta (a sort of longer fusilli) than the traditional spaghetti, and I thought it worked very well at capturing the sauce and guanciale. With that said, I would have preferred the guanciale to being cut into chunky cubes, as is traditional, as opposed to strips.
Rhum au Baba (0*): This dessert was also just okay. The baba was great, but the rum it was soaked in was not of the highest quality, and lessened the dish’s quality. They didn’t add enough chantilly cream, the wild cherries tasted horribly strange, and the crumble had a very odd crunchy texture. A fine dessert for the price, and while this might be an unfair comparison, Alain Ducasse’s baba blows this out of the atmosphere.
I’ll add at this point that I tried my dining partner’s chicken salad and pasta alla gricia, which while tasty, were also both below what I’d expect from a starred restaurant.
Overall, this is a great place to stop for a cheap lunch, or a dinner in a very nice atmosphere. My total for lunch for the pasta and dessert was €34. While I’m all for rewarding more affordable restaurants stars, they do still have to earn them, and unfortunately for Moma, while it’s a solid restaurant, none of the four dishes I tried were star worthy for me.
by ChevalBlanc1947