Restaurant Review: Roma’s Italian Restaurant - Hutchinson, KS
Heartland Culture
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Contact: gregloving@protonmail.com
We continued our tour of central Kansas’s Italian offerings (after a successful trip to Martinelli’s in Salina) with a trip to Roma’s Italian Restaurant in Hutchinson, Kansas. Hutchinson is a 30-minute trip on K-61 southwest from McPherson, and our westward journey pointed into a beautiful, fiery sunset. Roma’s is adjacent to the Hutchinson train station, which is on Amtrak’s Southwest Chief line. According to their website one can “take in the grandeur of the American West on an adventure between Chicago and Los Angeles” on the Southwest Chief. To enjoy that grandeur however, eastbound journeys depart at 1:18am and a westbound trip begins at 2:55am, so don’t ditch your frequent flier program just yet.
Inside, Roma’s offer’s a cozy, upscale setting, with beautiful red brick walls. We had salads and a fantastic spinage artichoke dip appetizer for starters. Perhaps deterred by my past public criticism, nobody ordered seafood for their entree. I ordered my go to spaghetti with meat sauce while my dad ordered a chicken pasta dish with white sauce. Mom also ordered spaghetti with meat sauce, but asked to alter the sauce and to substitute penne noodles for spaghetti noodles. When I informed her this was, in fact, not spaghetti with meat sauce, she was unperturbed. The dishes were excellent, and after tasting my mom’s dish and comparing it to my own, ostensibly equivalent item, I can confirm they were entirely different dishes. I don’t know what this off-menu creation was, but it was tasty.
Our waiter had some kind of accent and we spent most of the meal debating where she was from. My mom embarrassingly asked her at the end of the meal, and my guess of “Moldova” turned out to be wildly off the mark when she turned out to be Italian. After an additional embarrassing session of showing her a lookalike Italian’s Instagram account (“you look just like her!”), it was time to leave. However, not yet satisfied with my full public humiliation, dad asked for a photograph near a neat (but not that neat) fake, painted portal into a vineyard storage tunnel. I highly recommend Roma’s Italian Restaurant in Hutchinson, Kansas, it’s well worth the trip there.
