Aria Pizzeria and Bar

Terrible! If I could give this place a negative star rating I would! Long wait for subpar food. Stay away!

Aria Pizzeria and Bar has closed permanently as of September 30, 2014.

I can see why this place is closing down! The service is horrible and the food is marginal. I sat at the bar and placed an order before meeting a group of co-​workers. After they arrived, we were so frustrated with the service that we decided to jump ship and go across the street to Del Frisco’s Grille. You can thank your lucky stars that you will not have to endure this lame restaurant after today — good riddance.

One of those times when your child is so hungry you’ll just eat at the first sit-​down restaurant. The food was marginal — Cobb salad was watery and lacked any flavor. Garlic knots were delicious. Pizza drab. Server was decent… very unconcerned with us for the most part.

Unfortunately this was the one and only poor food experience my bf and I had while on vacation. The service was slow. Our server was kind but the food took long to come out. We each ordered a panini so it wasn’t anything difficult. We ordered the bruschetta to start, while I understand bruschetta is merely diced tomatoes, basil and olive oil, I expected this dish to add flavor. I did not expect to have to add salt in order to make something as simple as bruschetta go from poor to fair. Our panini’s were sad and disappointing. I had the roast beef and my bf had the cheese and bacon, both came with their «house-​made kettle chips» which tasted old and stale. It’s too bad because give the great location of this place it has so much potential but a place is only as good as their service and food and this place has neither.

The Skinny: Food is edible, but not that much better than what you’d get at an office cafeteria.
Upsides:
1. Convenient location — right off Federal Triangle metro, stone’s throw from Ronald Reagan Building
2. Outdoor seating and you can buy food from take-​out window
3. M-​F 5 – 7 pm happy hour $ 10 buffet of pizza, veggies & dip
Downsides:
1. Food is like food court-​quality
2. For a restaurant & restaurant prices, it’s depressing that quality is so low
Overall, if you dine here for convenience, expect cafeteria-​like fare but with restaurant prices. If you can walk 2 – 3 blocks, you’ll find much better.

The food is edible and fine, but nothing really sets Aria apart. The food is decent, but it’s pricey. I paid about $ 15 for a chicken caesar salad… the place was pretty empty when we first got there, but got more crowded as time went on. I guess a lot of people work in the area, as it’s near the Reagan building in Federal Triangle. The service is also a bit… awkward? I have no idea how to put it. The servers all just seemed a little off and didn’t really greet us and kept their heads down the entire time. Very strange and awkward. I might try the pizza next time, but honestly, if there are other restaurant options in the area, I’d rather go elsewhere. There was just nothing unique about Aria and the food wasn’t worth the price.

Run by idiots. Most beautiful day here and they won’t seat outside because they don’t want to. Left in search of more intelligent life.

Had lunch through the walk up window which was awesome. This allowed us to eat outside and not have to return our city share bikes! Had the Cobb salad. A bit much on the dressing but nonetheless tasty. also had a slice of pep pizza very satisfying. Super plus on the lady who gave us our food. Very happy and sweet!

Decent food. Convenient location. Slooow service.
We were trapped in Federal Triangle during a downpour, so we retreated to Aria. It was around 11:00 AM, well before the expected lunchtime crunch. Took 20 minutes to deliver four simple (non-​pizza) orders. My daughter enjoyed the homemade «chips» and the rest of the food was serviceable, but the wait sure seemed excessive and the wait staff wasn’t very attentive or enthusiastic.

Well, here’s all I can say: don’t fall for the signs you’ll see outside of the Reagan building. The outdoor seating is through the carryout service so you can’t drink. Also, just not that great.
When we arrived at 2 pm we were pretty hungry. We had driven the rest of the way from home in the morning, done a bit of walking and were about to go to the Holocaust Museum so we figured a quick bite would be a good idea (we also had an evening tour scheduled).
When we arrived there were two hostesses. A young white girl who was completely dazed… like deer in headlights meets coming out of anesthesia dazed. She seemed afraid of her own shadow and was really timid and quiet. In contrast there was a young black woman, maybe a little older than the other girl, who was kind of rude and not communicative at all. They were both, actually, rude.
After being seated RIGHT ON TOP OF another couple (there were like 5 tables occupied in the restaurant and we could have been spaced out) we were given menus and the waiter took a while to come over. While we were excited for local beer and the fact that they had Smuttynose (we can never find Smuttynose since moving to the Midwest), the tap lines are clearly not maintained well so the beer has a funky taste that we can taste in a second (see my reviews to roll your eyes at the extent of my beer snobbery).
Kris had the roasted veggie Panini. It was alright but very messy. The chips it comes with are good. I had the bruschetta. It was actually really good except that it was served on a plate of shredded lettuce. Weird. And unecessary.
Slow service, despondent and rude hostesses, no sense of how to seat people, average food… I’d skip it unless no other options.

This place has so much potential! A prime location, so much space, and an indoor/​outdoor venue.
I came here for happy hour with a large group of co-​workers (about 15 people). We were informed about the happy hour specials: $ 10 for the happy hour food buffet, and $ 15 for happy hour all you can drink (beer, wine, and rail from my understanding). For each special that you bought, you received a bracelet.
The happy hour buffet consisted of potato skins, salmon/​olive bruschetta, raw veggies, and several mini pizzas. Apparently pizza is the main draw of Aria. It was okay (I was starving so I would have eaten cardboard).
The bar seemed understaffed for the amount of people, which led to lengthy wait times. The majority of the staff gave off a vibe that read «yeah ok» instead of friendliness or warmth.
All together, something felt off about this place. Maybe it was the greatest hits of the 1970’s (which I dig, don’t get me wrong), or the fact that so much of the outside was sectioned off despite everyone’s desire to be outside, or the fact that the inside was so dark (could barely see the food!)… It felt like this restaurant had not received any special attention by its owners in too long.
Call me crazy, but the happy hour specials set up seemed wrong for the crowd and for this area. To order just one beer cost approximately $ 6-​$ 7, but many of us did not want the «all you can drink» options. So I watched people deliberate for too long over what to do about both food and drink. It should not be that difficult to participate in happy hour! A perfect example of an idea happy hour menu is Chef Geoff’s, just up the street. If this place had a more typical happy hour menu, and some cocktail servers, it could really be hopping.

Meh
Meh
Meh…
As clueless DC tourist we ate dinner here not realizing that essentially it’s a bar.
We had to sit inside where Usher was BLARING from the speakers and asked 3 times before they finally turned it down a hair.
There were tables available outside but we were not offered one until ¾ through eating our mediocre meal of pizza on cornmeal (the crust was just bad) and frozen meatballs (5 tiny breadballs — like you’d get out of a bag from Costco) for $ 9.
Kiddo had a scoop of chocolate icecream.
Fail.
Not an epic fail — but a fail on so many levels.
SKIP IT!

It was fine. We were walking around our hotel and it was the first place we stumbled upon. It looks gorgeous from the outside, but the menu is just blah. The service was ordinary. I got the eggplant parmesan which was actually pretty good, b/​c it had so much cheese on it :-).
The price was extraordinarily reasonable though, so that is good.

So much could be done with this place. It has so much potential. If only the food were better.
The location, just south of downtown, is back from the street a bit, somewhat hidden behind a row of trees with pretty white lights. Once you arrive, you realize the space is huge. The outdoor patio and indoor area are both expansive. We were here on an freezing evening in early March so of course we were inside. Indoors, the place doesn’t have much of a personality to speak of. The pale yellow interior detracts rather than adds to the ambiance and the floor checkered floor is just kind of depressing. The outdoor and indoor spaces both have different vibes, so much so that the place seemed to be suffering from something of an identity crisis.
The drink specials Wed-​Fri are great; they last till 8 instead of the usual 7 and include beer, wine, and pitchers of sangria or margarita. The beer list is short, though (although I liked my Long Hammer IPA). The sangria was full-​flavored (I don’t know if I’m qualified to be using the word robust when talking about wine because I’m not sure if I really know what I’m talking about, but that’s the word that came to mind) yet overly sweet.
As for the food, the spinach artichoke dip was pretty tasty, but the pizza… it was good right when it was brought out, but as it cooled down and the cheese started to solidify, it became more and more of a disappointment. In the end, it was overly salty and otherwise uninspired. I mean I know it was a $ 12 cheese pizza and I shouldn’t expect anything crazy, but you should be able to do better than that. Basically I feel like this place just over-​sweetens and over-​salts everything to the high heavens.
The service was fine… a little slow, and I had to track the waitress down to get a refill on my water, but we had hours to kill before we saw our movie, so I didn’t mind.
After all of the specials, our total bill for the artichoke dip, pizza, pitcher of sangria, and glass of beer was $ 20 per person. I’d probably come back for the drink specials if I’m in the area, but probably not the pizza. And only when it’s nice enough to sit outside.

Having been to Aria a handful of times now, I regret to admit that most of Aria’s cuisine sucks. Some colleagues are a fan of this place for happy hour and this is about Aria’s only strength for the good prices (~couple of bucks for drafts and ~$ 5 for wines) and widespread seating options – oudoors, covered patio, inside, barside, etc.
Alas, during happy hour or otherwise, the pizza here is greasy, has no redeeming characteristics and is really better passed along. I am a huge fan of pizza and even when hungry the pies here are, quite frankly, unappetizing.
On a recent informal visit with business associates, we came at lunch time and had a mediocre experience. The waitress was not particularly attentive and, apparently, neither were the kitchen staff. I am a moderate carnivore so ordering a veggie dish is a big deal to me. Thus, you might imagine how crushingly disappointed I was that my portabello-​goat cheese panini became a greasy grilled veggie-​filled mess that excluded the mushrooms. Perhaps, you might say, I should have sent the dish back but the waiter dropping of our paninis specifically called out ‘portabello’ and handed it to me. Who am I to question what their grilled portabello is supposed to look like? A quarter of the way through, I recognized the unfortunate truth but decided not to make a scene around work folk by sending a partly eaten dish back.
Here is another sad part of this story that emphasises a misadvertisement on the menu: when I hear the word panini, a certain image comes to mind of a flat sandwich with grill marks that is warm and gooey inside (especially if there is cheese). Hot-​to-​warm is the typical temperature at which such a meal is served so a foodie alarm should have sounded off in my head when the menu, under a header of ‘Paninis’ said that the meals are served at room-​temperature. Really? But at least now I get why: panini in Aria’s view means regular – or, more accurately, very small – non-​grilled sandwich (sigh). The chips, however, that come along side the sandwiches (err…I meant, paninis) are crispy, home made and – gasp! – even decent.

So I used to work at one of the federal agencies in the Ronald Reagan area, and Aria was a staple for after-​work socialization and libations.
With a GINORMOUS outdoor seating area, Aria offers a great spot to unwind during happy hour after work. First off, the HH is 4pm to close! Second, it includes deals like $ 3 draft beers, $ 5 wines, and even $ 20 margarita pitchers. They also run a pizza deal where you can grab a large cheese for $ 12.
While the food was typical Italian/​bistro, the environment and atmosphere are what draws a steady crowd. You can play cornhole in the outdoor area and order your happy hour drinks from the outdoor bar area. They even have a cornhole league (that plays on Tuesdays I believe). You’ll find a variety of customers here — from tourists to govies to couples on a date — it’s a great relaxing atmosphere. And you can continue to come in the chilly months because of the heaters. I’m sad I had to change jobs because I’m no longer in walking distance to this gem!

The best thing about this place is that it’s got a ginormous outdoor space, complete with some overhead coverage (though I say that, I’m not sure if that’s solely for sun or keeps out the rain! I wouldn’t test it o the rain though…) Perfect on a sunny day with a big group. Happy hour deals include some $ 3 drafts, $ 5 cocktails and wine specials (around $ 5). In the summer, the plaza usually has a show (typically live music or dance) going on at lunchtime on the weekdays.
Last time we were there, the day was overcast and had been off and on rain all week. Points for giving us the special on the Dark n Stormy, though I hope that next time they can actually make it with ginger beer! The bartender outdoors told us we’d have to go in for ginger beer, but once we got in, that bartender told us they hadn’t had any for two weeks!

Their tropical salad here was good, fresh greens in a mango vinaigrette with slices of ripe fresh fruit like pineapple on top. They had this honeyed almond crunch that was good on top of the salad.
I would come back here and get the salad! The pizza was just OK, kind of standard, medium crusted pizza– I got their margherita and their vegetarian. They actually tasted like frozen pizza from the grocery store you pop in the oven.

Hmm, I don’t know why this place is rated super low (it’s not closed, the new listing is
according to Unilocal HQ)! A-​ok by my standards.
We went during the heatwave this past week. They were pretty chill about letting our group reserve an area inside and put up little signs (on those table/​menu standup spirals). Standing and mingling in the seating area seems to be standard here, so it seems like a decent work/​networking happy hour place. I don’t know so much about actually sitting down and eating here though. The cheese pizza we got was pretty tasty, but nothing that special. Seems the inside was understaffed, but it didn’t take too long to flag down a bartender.
Could there be a better outside to inside entryway? Probably. And yes, they do have much better service outside (but it was 95 degrees outside). HUGE and beautiful space though.
HAPPY HOUR
Happy hour specials were decent ($ 3 rails, $ 5 caipirinhas). Not the best caipirinha I’ve tasted — needed more Cachaça and sugar for sure. If you order off happy hour, pretty pricey ($ 5.5 for a *bottle* of Peroni? but at least everything’s clearly priced on the overhead menu). 12 beers on draft.