Divin Peccato

Food was excellent. Our waitress was also extremely sweet and great. The food was delicious. The pastas were okay but the antipasti were all very good, especially the scallops. Loved it. Had a great glass of wine with it as well. Highly recommend coming to this small place which is just a little ways out from the Vatican.

Earlier this June was my third trip to Rome with a group of my students (there were 11 of us in the party this year). I chose this restaurant for dinner because of its proximity to our lodging in the Fornaci neighborhood and because I had seen it mentioned in a local Michigan newspaper as a spot to which a priest at the North American College had taken a guest – what’s better than local knowledge of the good eateries?
I made my reservation online, expecting that this would be essential given the crowds that we encountered at other restaurants in Rome this year. As it turned out, though there may have been a couple or two seated downstairs, the tables that had been empty when we entered never filled up.
The chef contacted me by email earlier in the day offering to help plan the menu for the group’s dinner. I certainly appreciated this and was interested in the «menu of courses», one of which he offered at 40 € and another at 50 €. (This was hardly inexpensive, but we had had an excellent experience on Via Appia for a similar price with a menu of courses, so I was game.) For 40 € he offered a «regional tasting menu» and for 50 € he offered a «tasting menu of our best dishes of land». We only go around once, so I thought we’d go for the «best dishes of land» for 50 euros.
Once at the restaurant, things started well: the ambience is the typical Roman, cozy, attractive setting and the service was good. When the antipasti started to come from the kitchen, they were delicious, but they never stopped coming from the kitchen. By the time they had finished coming out, many of us had eaten our fill. This was both a good and bad thing: on the whole, better to have too much food than too little, especially when one is responsible for feeding a group of young adults; on the other hand, it would have been good to know that we could have had so much and such tasty antipasti for what, I’m assuming, would have been far less than 50 euros per person.
My main concern with the restaurant were the courses that followed. Two pasta dishes came out, both made with a heavy, creamy sauce with meat that I had not previously encountered in Rome, tasty enough, but the quality had noticeably declined and the aim of the dishes seemed to be to kill off any remaining space that might have been left in our stomachs rather than to showcase the best dishes of the land.
Saltimbocca was promised for the meat course that followed, but the chef must have run out of meat or else decided that we weren’t worth the trouble: some of us received veal, while others received a different meat altogether. The waitress, who spoke English very well, should have alerted us to this fact, but did not. As with the pasta dishes, the taste was all right, but compared to the excellent saltimbocca that I had had earlier at I Clementini, this meat was dry and tough.
The dessert course somewhat redeemed things, but at that point, not to put things too literally, we had all bit off way more than we could chew. The final disappoint of the night was that, around three-​quarters of the way through, we must have finished off all of the house wine, which we couldn’t keep ordering to the table fast enough, what with all the food we were trying to get down. The house wine had been fine, but whatever we were switched onto was terrible. We complained to the waitress, but she laid the responsibility on the boss: it was what he had told her to give us. No one of us was drunk, we were just thirsty, and we could all tell that the wine was crap.
This turned out to be our most expensive meal in Rome. I hope the owner felt he took sufficient coin from our pockets this year because he will not be seeing any of my business again in the future. During ten days in Rome, we visited many restaurants, but thankfully, this was the only one that we will have to cross off the list for future years.

Excellent food. Wonderful location. Great service. Simply the best in Rome.

I already knew Divin Peccato as an excellent wine bar; now we tried it for dinner and weren’t disappointed. We had excellent antipasti, very good pasta and — never saw this in Italy — a vegetarian main course that seemed a good choice for a very warm day. The wine recommendation (biological Chardonnay) was spot on.

best service and food in roma !!