Dino's Coal Fired Trattoria

My parents like this place, so we tagged along with them for a Sunday lunch.  According to them, there is live acoustic guitar some nights, but the ambiance was next to dead at the time when we were there.  Only 1 other table of people.  Simple brick interior, tables throughout, nice looking bar to the side.  Large flat screens throughout.  Food was actually quite good.  We started with the fried calamari (largest, tastiest calamari ever - try this!) and a side of meatballs (just okay for me, although everyone else seemed to like them).  We did a large brick oven plain pie.  Amazing pizza here.  A thinner crust but it's awesome.  Crispy and light, good amount of cheese and great sauce.  Seriously, seriously good pizza.  We also did a linguine bolognese, which I found to be kind of boring.  The chicken francaise was good, but way too much garlic.  Like huge chunks of it.  I like garlic, so that was okay with me, but my husband said it was garlic overkill.  I'd say this place is more like 3.5 stars, but I'll make it 4 since it's my hometown and we need more good restaurants here.

We had lunch recently at Dino's. I ordered a grilled vegetable sandwich and while the veggies were good they were served on totally stale, dry bread. When I pointed it out to the waiter his response was complete disinterest. This is not surprising as he was on the phone for nearly the entire hour+ that we were in the restaurant. I am not kidding when I say he kept the phone at his ear each time he came to our table to bring us something or take an order. My kids ate a pizza and it looked very good and they were happy with it.  Food was mixed and service was poor.

I would definitely pass on this place. They try to make a thin crust pizza but it flopped all over the place when you try to eat it, thus making the cheese (whatever small amount of cheese on the pie) slide right off so you are basically going from eating a mouthful of cheese to just crust with tomato sauce. The taste of the pizza was not anything special. If you do go and it's cold out, bring a sweater. It's very cold and drafty there.