Trattoria Rustica

I came here with a friend for dinner on a Saturday night and it was oddly empty. The food we ordered was delicious! The service was good (we were the only people in the place but still!) I took my fiancé here for our anniversary and we has a similar experience. Food was great and service was great. I’m not sure why people would disagree. The food was reasonably priced and very good. Would definitely go back!

Came here a few times with the
deal. Definitely worth it! I think they’re renovating right now, but if they are coming back soon ill be there waiting. A foot spot for BYOB and get togethers.

Good food but misleading advertising! We went in yesterday, right after I purchased the $ 10 for $ 20 deal. At the end of our meal, the server & manager told us that since they were acquired by another restaurant, Rustica Trattoria was no longer accepting their coupons for $ 10 off $ 40 for checking in, or the $ 10 for $ 20 purchase deal.
I had to request a refund from Unilocal.To make up for it, the manager/​owner did comp one of our appetizers.
But again, DO NOT GO LOOKING TO GET THIS DEAL.

I’ve eaten really delicious food in many different restaurants … This restaurant is a wonderful place to dine in with friends and/​or friends… Its BYOB but theres a lq store around the corner which you can walk to or they will walk to you and deliver… Very cool. Back to the food, its to die for… The bread is delicious. Its focaccia bread and its homemade and just fantastic… I’ve never tried the seafood since I don’t eat seafood but everything else was oh. My. God. Yummm. The food portions are good specially the pastas. The seafood chicken pork are usually big pieces … The appetizers are fresh and delicious. I don’t have even know what to say anymore. The staff may have a down day but nobody is perfect …

Although we had a reservation for 6 people, we were seated right by the kitchen where we felt every passerby and thump. At one point the waitress asked me to move my handbag from my chair because she kept hitting it.
The restaurant was a full house and there were only two waitresses and a handful of bus guys. We WAITED and WAITED for everything; orders to be taken, appy’s, silverware, dinners, coffee arrived in different sized mugs and creamer half full, and dessert came after the coffee was long gone. Food was rushed to our table and empty plates were picked up one at a time. Three of us ordered salmon with spinach, mine came with just a few string beans. After waiting to find a server, she brought a plate of spinach for us to share.
The reason I’m writing this review is because of what happened next: a glass of water broke at our table and after they cleaned up the broken glass they LEFT the soaked PAPER tablecloth. After waiting to find them I asked them to remove it and they did but then left the wet cloth tablecloth which was underneath. It was a real mess and I didn’t feel comfortable that all the glass had been removed. We again waited for our check and they added an 18% gratuity!
I’m giving two stars because I liked my salmon. The eggplant appy offered one piece of eggplant, the arugula salad was good but it was just greens, no red onion, tom or nuts.
Give yourself plenty of time to eat if you plan on going because you’ll be there a long time.

Went with some friends and we had so much fun!
The chief was very nice and attentive.
Great place and delicious food! Loved it

What a delicious Italian restaurant! I went there tonight with a group of nine of my friends, and we were all delighted! The restaurant is so cozy and it looks like an authentic trattoria italiana. The food was exceptional… We all had the Price Fixed menu and we ate soooo much! Everything tasted delicious all the way through dessert (the tiramisu is out of this world). The owner/​chef was incredible. Super attentive and kept coming to our table to check on us. From beginning to end, i couldn’t have asked for a better experience. Tanti grazie!

Went on a Saturday night about 8 pm. Waited about 20 minutes – not bad at all for a Saturday in Montclair. Nice BYOB place with great old world ambiance. We were seated against the wall with another table literally 6 inches away from us. We dealt with it. Very small limited menu. Table was covered in a white paper table cloth with an actual cloth one under it – loose the paper – come on. For apps we had an arugula salad which was fresh and fantastic, an order of their famous meatballs and they were superb-​maybe the best I have ever had, and an order of mussels-​sorry but yuck. Not a good dish at all. Sauce was watery with zero flavor and mussels were very very small – waste of time. Don’t order. For dinner we had short ribs with mashed potato and spaghetti rustica – bacon, pancheta and mushroom in a cream sauce. Short ribs were more like pulled pork that was overcooked and very dry. Pasta had a fantastic flavor but pasta was way under cooked and all stuck together – should have never came out of kitchen like that. If you don’t bring your own beverages your only choices are coke –diet coke and water. They don’t put any ice in water so it’s usually room temp. Bring your own drinks. Service is ok – very very friendly wait staff but slow and not in sync with each other. They brought out our dinner and asked the table next to us if it was theirs when they said no they took it back to kitchen instead of thinking to ask us if it was ours. Prices are a bit high for the portion sizes you get. Everything was on the small side. Any place can have an off night so we might give it another try.

I had dinner here on a oddly quiet Saturday night in Montclair. The place only had a few people in it and we originally came for Mesob, but it the wait was over an hour there, so we chose this instead. It has, as the name indicates, a very rustic feel. It’s super homey and all of the staff are very attentive and friendly.
My friend and I split the butternut squash ravioli, order of riceballs and a beet salad. Everything was super scrumptious. All of the dishes we chose were more than satisfying. Since both of us don’t eat very large portions, sharing was the perfect way to budget and get a great meal in at the same time. I highly recommend this place if you are in the area!

We dinned here for a birthday with a party of 5+.
I had the mozzarella and pesto crostini, the pasta con vodka, and the tiramisu. All were delicious, especially the tiramisu! Will have to try the pasta with chicken next time.
I love the ambiance. Groups tend to be loud, so this place was perfect for us :) The staff was very friendly and attentive.
My only advice would be for the menu to have more appetizer options for vegetarians… bruschetta is always a hit!
We enjoyed our time and will be back again!

The best part about this place was the service. We went for my cousins birthday with a party of 10 and the servers were friendly, joking with us and attentive. I wish I could say the same about the food. It’s not all bad, the penne in the vodka sauce was tasty but my eggplant was not fully warmed up. I mean the least you should expect is food to be warm, but I’ll give them a pass, it could be a one time thing. They also need more appetizers and more options for vegetarians. It’s a fun ambiance and no one yelled at us to keep it down, as our group tends to be loud, which is a big plus :) We did enjoy ourselves. I guess it was the 9 bottles of wine we bought with us. Most places in the area are BYOB so bring a few bottles to numb your senses, your food just might taste better ;)

I have been to plenty of Italian restaurants to say this was below the standard.
Really nice ambience, located in a nice town but there are so many restaurants on this avenue that you have to be on top of your game in order to knock out the competition.
It’s funny actually, my boyfriend and I accidentally ended up in here being that we didn’t read the sign carefully. We meant to go to the Ethiopian restaurant next door. Anywho, we were seated at a shaky table (the worst) and when our waiter came by we started shaking our table making our waiter uncomfortable and immediately seating us at another table (good job!). Lol.
Let’s talk staff. If there’s anything worse than annoying customers, it’s staff that doesn’t cooperate with one another. This is a BYOB place and my boyfriend decided to bring over wine. Our waiter had asked a waitress for the bottle opener which would have been a 1 minute thing and she brushed passed him to open beer bottles (should’ve taken 5 seconds) which took her like 5 minutes to open. Really?
I had the salmon dish… a definite no no. The menu is limited and I found no interest on anything on the menu. For me, when in doubt, stick to fish. I should’ve went another direction.
Boyfriend had some chicken dish, not memorable. Hmm… we shared an appetizer, not memorable at all (see photos though). Okay the appetizer was okay. I believe this came with focaccia bread, which was a little burnt, uhhh.
We opted out for dessert, nothing was good enough to want to stick around. We however were forced to stick around waiting for a check that never came, I thought we were about to get a free meal.
Our waiter was nice though, well at least to my boyfriend. Totally ignored me, he was all about my boyfriend… (I had my eye on him, lol).
Too many great Italian restaurants to settle for this one. As always, try for yourself if you please to, you may have a better experience.

A friend and I decided to use a Groupon on a Saturday night at 6:30. «Charlie» gave us our menus and recited the specials to us. I asked for the osso buco. They didn’t have it. (Then why is it on the menu online?)
We split an order of appetizer meatballs (you got 2). Ok, they were pretty good, though needed some grated cheese to bring them to life. We had to ask twice for bread which were two small pieces of foccacia. It was good.
We both ordered the pork chop special. It was a pork chop giambotta. Meh. A few skinny potato wedges, a bit of red pepper and a big honking hot green pepper on the plate. It had to be at least 7″ long!
It wasn’t anything to brag about, and the best I could describe about the chop, it tasted «pork-​ey», but not in a good way. It had a slightly sour taste. I wasn’t really happy with my dish and then my friend announced that she found a hair in the food. OMG! It grossed me out and I couldn’t finish my meal. «Charlie» was surprised and asked my friend if it could perhaps be her own. WHAAAATTTT? He took the plate and she ordered something else, Chicken Brianna, another mediocre dish. She ate it and almost liked it.
«Charlie» wanted to know why I did not want my dinner wrapped to go. I told him point blank that the hair in the food grossed me out. He seemed unfazed.
It was time for dessert. «Can we see the dessert menu?» «Oh, we don’t have it written down, I’ll tell you what it is.» Very limited desserts, but the cannoli was good because it came from somewhere else. «Do you have espresso or cappuccino?» «No, our espresso machine is broken.» Saturday night and their espresso machine is broken. Geeez! The service was polite, I’ll give them that, but they didn’t even try to comp our desserts for our inconvenience. If we didn’t have the Groupon, I would have been really annoyed! I will never go there again. Mediocre food and they don’t have half the stuff on the menu.

There is an awesome Italian restaurant in Montclair, NJ that I absolutely love. The food is made to order and there’s a lot of love in the making. We started with a Caesar salad with anchovy that was really fresh. Then we had their meatballs that were of just the right consistency and the sauce was just like my grandma used to make… so I loved it.
Next we had shrimp in a garlic sauce, mussels in a garlic and wine sauce, Italian bread with olive oil and herbs. The hangar steak was tender, juicy and delicious.
The salmon was flaky and tasty. But the pork chops were just outrageous. They were pounded very thin and breaded and fried. I never had pork chops that tasted so good.
We aso had butternut squash ravioli in a savory red sauce made al dente and yummy. To add to the pasta damage, we had linguini neri (black linguine) and shrimp, with a light red sauce.
Eating dinner at Tattoria Rustica was so comfortable, it was like eating at my aunt Fran’s house.

After a week of marginal food on a sub-​par Princess cruise (Crown Princess — see my review elsewhere in Unilocal and Cruise Critic), my wife and I got back to Montclair with a jones for a good, basic, satisfying meal at a local Italian eatery. After ruminating for a while (Giotto? Excellent food, but noisy) we decided to give this place a try. We made reservations and showed up on time. It was a bitterly cold night and we waited in the foyer for a bit but were finally shown to a very undesirable table at the far left back, next to kitchen traffic. We declined this table and after a bit of back and forth, were shown to a two-​top in the middle of the center seating section. The service was a bit clunky and amateurish, but we were hungry and had a good bottle of Chianti uncorked and poured. The menu was nothing special — typical Southern Italian — but there were a couple of items we selected.
The food: we ordered the salad with chevre to share. This turned out to be a hastily composed dish of field greens with a few large chunks of firm chevre. As these chunks were too large, we had to sub-​divide them. The salad was just OK; nothing special, and a little sloppily prepared. That sloppiness continued to rear its tousled head through the meal. A dish of rigatoni with eggplant was delivered with the eggplant basically raw and the sauce an forgettable nonentity. Grated cheese was not offered when the pasta was served, and we had to ask a busboy-​trainee to bring some over. My «lasagne» was delivered only slightly warm, so I had to send it back for re-​heating. When it was redelivered, the layering had been reduced to a sloppy mess, with the layers having separated and galloped off in different directions. This was bad enough, but the lasagne itself was marginally acceptable: too much ricotta, too little meat, and almost no taste. Reboot this dish.
Also, the place was jammed (good for them), but they were not prepared to handle a full house. Our waitress was pulled in too many directions, and we were happy to finally get the check and get back to some DVR’d Downton Abbys.
So, later for Rustica. There are too many other good places to drop your bucks.
Note: If you want lasagne the way is it served in Italy, I recommend Giotto’s version. It is made with bechamel sauce, not red sauce, the pasta layers are thin and delicate, and it not overly cheesy.
A final BTW: I simply do not get how anyone can rate this place more than two stars, at the most.

Great food, great service! They have large portions! I would recommend getting a reservations because they do not have a lot of tables. Food is very reasonably priced and you will have lots left over!

Last night was my third time having dinner here. It’s my sisters fav spot and I decided to treat her for her birthday. It is a very quaint, comfortable place with great ambience (except the lighting was so dim I could barely read my menu). The service and food is good and my only complaints would be the way they kind of rush you to get out. Every time I put my fork down for a split second, a waiter would try to take my plate. After the third time I got a little annoyed. I also think it’s a bit overpriced for such a limited menu.
I made the reservation through Groupon and received 20% off our meal with no hassle. Overall it was a good night.

Somewhat missed the mark
We have dined at Trattoria Rustica before and were pleased; so much so, that we brought good friends with us on another visit. Our most recent visit, however, was somewhat disappointing.
Although I want to give Rustica higher marks, my intent is to have my comments noticed by Ownership so that their level of stature stays consistent. First off, paper dinner napkins were found on the table; we were advised that the restaurant had «run out» of their linen napkins. Frankly, the Montclair area is not exactly Cambodia and I dare say that making a run to a local store would yield a wide variety of linen napkins any day of the week (in a pinch).
Italian bread with butter was placed on our table shortly after arriving. Frankly, I’m a bread and butter guy and I must point out that the four (4) slices of bread were approx. 2″ long and about 3/​8″” thick. We began eating the bread which was consumed rather quickly. We left one slice, being polite with each other. Surely we could have asked for more; we did not. We expected our server to offer same. Now, to be clear, this discussion is not about bread, it’s about the fact that Rustica is that type of restaurant that should provide more than adequate bread… nuf said.
Not one to overlook their famous meatballs, I ordered them as an appetizer. The sauce was, as usual, wonderful. However, it appeared that the interior of the meatballs had been frozen. My entre’ consisted of one of the Specials, clams and shrimp over pasta. The clams yielded very small pieces of clam, the shrimp were adequate. The pasta serving portion was, perhaps, suited for a child, and overall, the temperature of the food (other than the meatballs) was not up to par.
Now, seeing that I was very hungry and, did not want to make a fuss, I proceeded to eat all of my food. (Note that we were the ONLY diners in the restaurant when we ordered which would have provided more than ample time to properly prepare our food.) Considering all of the above, combined with the «not so inexpensive» pricing, Rustica missed the mark during our visit which concerns me when compared to earlier visits.

My review is for the Wednesday Night Vegan Pop-​Up, this isn’t related to the regular menu at Trattoria which I have not tried.
The chef, Sally Owens, knows how to cook. Like… really, really, knows how to cook.
Cleverly named Moctoberfest, this menu was German inspired and infused a lot of those sour and savory notes you’d typically find in food of that region.
First course was creamy borscht with creamy dill sour cream and an apple and beet relish. The balance of flavor was perfect, and even though it was «creamy» it was a perfect light soup with bright flavors. The presentation was gorgeous, too. Such a vibrant, silky red color.
Second was a warm red cabbage coleslaw, crispy brussel sprouts leaves, house made pickles, and a sour-​poppy-​mustard emulsion.
–It’s hard to formulate a perfect description for this course. It was my favorite. It was one of the best things I’ve ever tasted. I guess that’s suitable.
Main course– Tempeh Bratwurst, caraway pureed greens, warm sweet potato and fingerling salad, leek and spiked cider vinaigrette, cauliflower and mushroom stroganoff w/​pretzel crumbs, stewed sauerkraut and apple, mustard and sweet and sour carrot dill relish.
–Sounds like there’s a lot going on here but all of the ingredients melded perfectly and made complete sense. My only criticism is, maybe the shape of the tempeh bratwurst should have looked more like an actual bratwurst, just from an aesthetic perspective, going with the Moctober theme.
Last Course– Dessert Trio– there was a German chocolate cake, apple crumb cake, and a black forest chocolate truffle atop cherry compote.
–the German chocolate cake was easily one of the best desserts I’ve ever had. Perfectly sweet with a hint of savory so it wasn’t overpowering. The apple crumb cake was topped with a faux whipped cream would have any meat eater confused.
Only criticism, I just don’t think the chocolate truffle worked necessarily. There was a cinnamon note that fused the two cakes together. As for the truffle, the compote was cloyingly sweet, taking away from the subtle delicateness and tastiness of the cakes. Also, maybe the art of the developing a great vegan truffle hasn’t been crafted by the chef as well as she has with her other food! The texture was off.
GO CHECK THIS OUT.
She’ll have us all converted.

Ate here on saturday night with my husband & my dad. With the rest of Montclair and surrounding already packed, we found only a few tables taken at 6:30pm, which we weren’t sure was such a good sign.
After hearing some so-​so reviews for this BYO restaurant, the three of us had a great meal. My husband would have liked more than the two meatballs they gave him for an app ($ 9), but they were pretty good. We all had specials — Pork chop, tilapia & lasagna, and all were very good. The regular menu wasn’t particularly exciting, but there is enough to choose from that everyone will find something to enjoy.
While service was a bit slow, we found everyone incredibly nice and helpful (when they were around). They also brought us the wrong check at the end of the night (after having waited a while to get our waiter’s attention to get it at all), but they had started getting busy, and I guess it happens.
The total came to about $ 75 for 1 app, 1 soda and three specials. I thought it was a bit overpriced, especially given the competition in Montclair, but not ridiculously so. I think we’d come back, but maybe only if everything else is booked up.