Verona

I had the caesar salad, chicken parmesan, with a side of peperoncino pasta and my husband had the snapper rosso with grilled veggies. It was great! I travel from Dallas to Texarkana to help out the local hospitals (I’m a physician) and I honestly believe this is on the Dallas level. I am excited to find a place that I can be proud to eat at and can take my colleagues. Go Verona!

Texarkana does not have a lot of restaurant options. So it’s always nice when a new place opens up, and particularly so if it’s downtown.
Verona bring a sliver of hope into downtown Texarkana which has all of, what like… 8 restaurants? Maybe closer to 5…
Anyways Verona is being marketed as Italian Fine Dining. The service is pretty much there. The servers are attentive but not overbearing. They speak in hushed towns. But they don’t quite know everything about their menu just yet. Or at least they did not on opening day. Maybe that’s okay but I am of the opinion that if you are marketing as fine dining, there is an expectation to uphold. You cannot expect it to be okay because Texarkanians? are nice. But it was their first day so let’s overlook it…
The atmosphere is nice, quiet, a little dim. It’s all one open room so there really is no room for privacy. There’s probably about 15 – 20 tables of varying sizes. When full I can see that it may be AHHH but with the six or seven tables that were filled when I was there for lunch, it wasn’t bad.
When you are seated, you are brought a basket of bread and plates for Olive Oil and Balsamic Vinegar is already on the table. Our first batch was crusty and hard, but the second and third batch was crusty and soft. Toss up.
Rest of the food leaves something to be desired. It’s not that it’s bad but it’s not very well cooked. At least not yet. I ordered the Snapper Rosso from the lunch menu. Its a filet of small snapper over cooked to the point of it being mostly pretty tough, but a few morsels of tender juicy fish. I don’t know if Rosso means super sour or what but it was super lemony. And I cook with lemon and it gives it a lemony aroma not drenched in Lemon Burre Blanc. Drenched is not the right word as it wasn’t really soaked but it was covered in the stuff. It seems to be that all the dishes come with a side of spaghetti with marinara sauce. Pretty good, but was kinda cold.
I also had a lunch side Caesar salad to go with my meal. Which at lunch is $ 5 but the same thing is $ 7 at dinner. Price is high, but if it was the perfect Caesar salad I could have lived with it. But it ended up being not actually watery in consistency but tasting watery. I don’t know if the dressing was watered down accidentally or the lettuce was not adequately drained. I was not happy. Oh and it had two pieces of anchovy beautifully placed on top of the salad. Not for everyone, but I liked it.
*They charged me for a regular Caesar by mistake and while the entire exchange of:
«hey excuse me you over charge me,
actually maam it says right here $ 7,
actually it says right here for $ 5…»
was quite pleasant. So while I’m a stickler for service, I’m going to overlook this for now.
My friend that I dined with had the Chicken Marsala and while we didn’t go into detail, she indicated that it was ‘okay’.
All of this to say, a lot of it was forgivable, especially being opening day. I still have high hopes for Verona. I’m not entirely sure the fine dining aspect of eating out is what Texarkana wants from a new restaurant downtown but I am hopeful that once a couple weeks, maybe a month or two, passes and Verona gets everything together it’ll be a great place for a special occasion and the go to place for romantic proposals.
I’ll be back in a few months with hopefully infinitely BETTER review.
Oh, and their coke, probably all drinks except for water, is from a bottle. So there are no refills. At least not unlimited refills under one price.
Most of the Lunch options were between $ 13~$ 15, with a few more expensive options. Regular Entrees, or Secondis as they call it is between $ 20-​$ 25 with a few outliers, both more affordable and more expensive.
Both of us had checks of about $ 25.