Enjoyed a pleasant family dinner at Rao's one evening. We had a nice experience and fairly decent food. Two of the dishes were quite tasty - pasta with clams and the pasta with peas and prosciutto. Probably the best part of the whole experience was watching the server transfer the pasta from the serving dish to the plate... table-side. Fun!
Things to mention where improvement should be considered:
1. Serving chicken on the bone. The Chicken Scarpiello was tasty but hacking the meat off of bones was a bit too "home-style" for me. At home that would be fine but not in a restaurant at those prices. Small pieces of bone had to be carefully dealt with. I really worried about getting one lodged in my throat since several somehow made it off of the plate and didn't get noticed until it was chewed. (I hate spitting out food -- even discretely into a napkin -- while dining in public.
2. The sausage -- yuck: dry, mealy, some "carmelized" beyond the carmel stage, and generally tasteless. A real disappointment. AVOID!
3. Dessert prices. Twelve bucks for a piece of cheesecake or cannoli. They were tasty but not worth the price. Next time we'll walk across the hall and have a $7 Payard pastry!
Now that we've experienced part of the menu I think we are in a better position to make better choices next time.