Rocca

We visited this restaurant today with 4 adults and 2 toddlers. I’d recommend making reservations as we had to wait about 20 minutes to get a table.
This is not a child friendly restaurant as there are no high chairs or changing tables in the restrooms and the tables are so close together it is impossible to put your buggy at your table. This left us wrangling two toddlers throughout lunch.
The food was very delicious, but the waitress forgot about the wine I had ordered and I had to ask twice for it. Wine was much needed since I was trying to restrain my baby the entire lunch!
We ordered pizzas, pasta, bread and some of the most delicious arancini I’ve ever tasted. I’d give this place a ⁵⁄₅ for food, but ³⁄₅ due to the incredible difficulty we had bringing our children here.
I would go back sans child :)

Sympa rapide bon.
Le petit plus, la serveuse vient raper son parmesan frais à table.

The food is very good here, at good prices. The staff all speak Italian, and it makes the atmosphere more fun.

Firstly, we are tourists but we try to avoid traps. This place is a short walk from our hotel and we tried it based on another excellent Unilocal review from a fellow Texan. I’ll just say it was so good that we ate here two nights in a row. Very nice staff and wonderful authentic Italian food. Come here and get treated like a local!

My friend and I wandered in here for a late dinner on Saturday night around 9:30 PM, looking for a quick bite and after seeing that Franco Manca down the road still had a long queue waiting outside. By comparison, we walked into Rocca and a table was prepared for us immediately, and we placed our order within minutes. We asked our server if a pizza was big enough to share between 2 people; she said that it was 4 slices, so we ordered two, but in hindsight, one would really have been enough. They are the size of an extremely large dinner plate, and I’m not sure what size slices she was referring to, but it was many more than 4 in my mind. I got the funghi, which had many different types of mushrooms and was exceptionally tasty, and my friend got the ventricina, which also looked good. We also shared the bruschetta al pomodoro and a bottle of the barbera red wine. The food was great and the service also excellent. I would definitely drop by again.

Great all rounded restaurant, better to book otherwise you will probably have to wait. The food, especially the pizza is very good, thing crust pizza with tasty toppings, perfect balance between soft and crisp. The wine is decent too, as is the desert menu. Service has always been on top form. The price is something else, probably one of the best deals in town!

Fantastic Italian restaurant! Accidentally found it after visiting the museums on Exhibition road. Tasty pasta, wide range of wine and authentic Italian staff. Really enjoyed having dinner there.

I ordered the prosciutto pizza and my husband the bolognese. Both were quite delicious. Our hotel recommended we take the 2 minute walk to Rocca and it was a great choice after a busy day traveling. it was casual and inviting. Fantastic wine and great food. I noticed many other comments about the service being bad but ours was excellent!

Everything was delicious and waiters were very friendly. My husband is from Italy and upon eating the pizza he said it’s the best he’s had since the last time he was in Italy! We will definitely be back here.

I would give this place 4.5 stars but am rounding up.
Food was really excellent. I particularly loved the grilled prawns starter — best and unique of such I ever had at an Italian place. The grilled veggies and mozzarella /​tomato platter were both great too. The starters themselves were enough to get our appetite going.
Then came the mains. I ordered the seafood pasta, which interestingly enough, was served in thick udon noodle type of pasta. The seasoning and seafood were good, but unfortunately, the pasta was a bit dry and sticking together. This is where I would dock .5 star.
My other friends’ dishes all seemed great. They ordered a pizza, lasagna and crab meat pasta, and they all said they really liked their dishes.
We were very pleasantly surprised when we got the bill. For the four of us, the total came down to £70, which is a great value in London.
Ambience was very nice as well. Modern and sophisticated, it is good for any type of occasion.
Service was good and generally prompt, though it got a little difficult to get attention toward the end of the dinner as the restaurant got more crowded.
All in all, thumbs up.

Love this place, brilliant pasta, nice quite environment, wonderful service. Highly recommend

There’s surprisingly quite a few Italian places in the area. My wife and I have tried a couple and Rocca is certainly our favorite. The service was friendly and attentive. The atmosphere is buzzing but relaxed. And most importantly the food is delicious but reasonably priced considering the area.

Very friendly service, the pizza was delicious! My wife ordered the squid ink crab meat pasta (also very tasty). To top it off it’s very affordable considering the atmosphere and location.

The food, for the price you pay is great. Pizza is the way to go here for cheap eats, the lasagne is a solid decent one. The service is, neglectful, however they are very busy and don’t take bookings for small groups. The bathrooms could have done with a little more attention from the staff, and the queue of customers would perhaps go down a little quicker if there was only one staff member attending to them, not three. I would give this only 3 stars, however the price was too good, I would certainly go back again and recommend it to a friend in the area.

I came here on a Friday night. The restaurant was packed and it seemed to have a great atmosphere.
It took awhile for us to get a table. The guy who was in charge of seating us could have been a bit more accurate with how long our table would be, but he was rushed off his feet so it can be forgiven!
The reason for the low score is the food, which I found to be bland. The pizza base was just heavy and had no flavour.

Rocca surprised me on several counts: reasonably inexpensive, decently prepared Italian food in South Ken. I mean. It could have just been terrible and touristy or way more expensive, but it’s neither and it’s somewhere I’d most likely go again. The menu is pretty straightforward and is nothing you won’t have seen elsewhere, but the proof is in the pudding and the pudding is this case is, in fact, not just pudding but inclusive of multiple courses.
In short: I had the calamari and tagliatelle bolognese. What can I say, I was feeling particularly British that day. In the end, I could’ve done without the calamari as it was pretty non-​descript. Like, it wasn’t bad, it was just kind of… meh. The bolognese was pretty good though. The ragu was rather flavourful and decent quality for £7.50.
Although other reviewers thought the service was a bit haphazard, it was fine for us (and we had a group of 12 to boot) and they were pretty chatty too. I think Rocca is pretty decent for the price. It’s cheaper than Carluccio’s (and most other restaurants in a similar range) and the food is not far off in terms of quality (whilst being far above the restaurants below it). That said, there are a few other places of better quality with comparable prices (Nuraghe in Tufnell Park springs to mind), although the latter is in Zone 2, not in a prime renting zone. Still, Rocca is a good addition to SK and worth a return trip.

The ambience is great with a relatively friendly staff for service.
The food is not bad too, considering the price! The carbonara can be missed, and the steak should be ordered rare, nothing more than that. My friends and I ordered a medium rare steak and it was a little too tough even then, so please get a rare steak or nothing at all!
The calamari is good, with a really light and fluffy batter which compliments the juicy soft squid in it.
Overall, a more than above-​average place for affordable fine dining.

In sum: Really good food. Really horrible service.
We had an early dinner at Rocca. While our food (calamari, pizza, cod, chocolate cake) were all quite excellent and perfectly prepared, our dining experience was overshadowed by the fact that our server went AWOL in the middle of our meal. She was really friendly to begin with but perhaps she got angry at one of the other servers who were way too busy flirtling with one another? Supposely there was a shift change going on (at 6 PM?) but we had to flag down different servers for both our dessert order as well as our check.

Food: sorry to say but rather sad italian. More what you’d expect from an American-​Italian chain, yet I can think of better ones. My carbonara was below ordinary. Pasta themselves had less taste than what you can buy at Waitrose.
My calamari were just ok
Toilets: pass the test
Décor: warm, nice, within the good average
Service: lots of waiters who are prompt. The best thing about this restaurant.
Nevertheless, will not return

Rocca di Papa was a great choice for an enjoyable, Saturday lunch. Showing up towards the beginning of lunch service meant we had our pick of the liter of seating, and an almost empty front patio. The restaurant is in the perfect location for spotting some of the more exotic cars of London, as within an hour I spotted multiple Ferraris, Aston Martins, and too many Maseratis to keep track of. That being said, the menu is fairly priced, and shouldn’t leave a hole in your wallet.
To start the meal I sat down with an Americano, which didn’t disappoint. Next was the calamari as an appetizer, with my only complaint being that I wish there was more on the plate! Very good, and obviously fresh. This was all brought out quite briskly by the waiters and waitresses, who worked in tangent to bring out parts of the meal.
Now onto the meat (or chorizo) of the review. Both myself and my dining partner ordered pizza off the menu. I myself ordered the Iberica, while he ordered the Prosciutto. Sitting on the plate it looked more like a piece of art than a pizza pie, but as voracious as I was it didn’t stay that way for long. The sauce was delicious, and complimented the chorizo on the pizza quite well. However, the crust was the best part, being crunchy yet not flakey, and held some serious flavor. The Prosciutto was reported to me to taste quite nice as well, with the crust once again receiving rave reviews.
After all was said and done, another Americano was poured and a dish of chocolate gelato was served, while a waiter pushed up the shade of the terrace to let in some more of the suns rays. The rich flavor of the gelato left me more than satisfied as we left to explore more of London’s sights and sounds.
I highly recommend Rocca to anybody looking for a £20 lunch in the South Kensington area. The pizza was top notch, the coffee was well above average, and both were accompanied with an enjoyable atmosphere and friendly waitstaff.

My mom and I got tired of pub food on our visit to London, and this was the perfect change.
We split a bottle of wine and started with an order of bread and a buffalo mozzarella and tomato salad. The bread was warm and mostly very soft (there were a couple of different kinds) and had delicious, grassy (in a good way) olive oil with balsamic vinegar for dipping. The salad was more of a warm tomato sauce, served with slices of toasted bread, a chunk of mozzarella, and olives and basil for garnish. Very good.
I ordered the pasta carbonara, and my mom got a seafood pasta dish. Mine was a bit rich (my own fault for ordering carbonara, I think), but otherwise great — the pasta was the perfect texture. I tried the seafood pasta, and it was wonderful, with a not-​too-​light/​not-​too-​heavy sauce and tons of seafood in it.
We got a scoop of strawberry sorbetto to finish, and it was sweet but light and excellent.
I was amazed by how good the prices were compared to other places we’d eaten. The atmosphere was nice but not too stuffy or fancy. Definitely worth a visit if you want something a little different and are in the area!

Bereits von außen hat man den Eindruck eines professionellen, gehobenen Italieners, der sein Geschäft jenseits des Bumspizza-​Klientels betreibt. Die Preise hielten sich dennoch in Grenzen, fast ist man auf Münchner Niveau unterwegs. Da merkt man dann doch die Außenbezirkslage. Aber sehr angenehm!
Innen ist der Service und die Qualität der Speisen und Getränke, wie man sich das IN ITALIEN vorstellt. Sowas findet man selbst in Deutschland inzwischen nicht mehr so oft, wo in zahlreichen Städten die Inder, Pakistanis und Türken das Geschäft der Fastfood-​Services in fester Hand haben; das was vor Jahren noch durch die Italiener (in Deutschland) dominiert wurde.
Zurück zum «Rocca»: Pizza, Vino und Salat waren oberer Durchschnitt und wie gesagt deutlich besser als von so manch Indien-​Pizzaservice bei uns. Der Service war aufmerksam, aber nicht aufdringlich.
Die Preise waren human, Preis-​Leistung war hier auf jeden Fall sehr stimmig!
Zu erwähnen ist noch das sehr gemütliche, aber dennoch moderne Ambiente; hier hat der Innenarchitekt durch die subtil eingesetzte indirekte Beleuchtung wirklich ganze Arbeit geleistet. Einzig der sehr hohe Lautstärkepegel hat etwas davon abgehalten, hier in chilliges Fallenlassen abzugleiten.

Ein glücklicher Zufall hat uns nach einem langen Tag in London hierhin geführt und wir haben es gleich zu einem unserer Lieblingsrestaurants gekürt:
— herzlicher und freundlicher Empfang und Bedienung
— die sehr günstige Hauptgerichte (7– 8£) machen es leicht, sich selbst ein Menü zusammen zu stellen
— mehrere Weinsorten mit Flaschenpreisen deutlich unter 20 £
— die Gerichte waren alle sehr schmackhaft, sehr leckerer Pizzateig
— kein obligatorischer Aufschlag in der Rechnung für den Service
Das Publikum war vom Alter her sehr gemischt, alle Tische waren fast durchgängig belegt. Der Service war dennoch immer ansprechbar und hat sich für ein wenig Small Talk Zeit genommen.

Das Rocca in Kensington liegt in der Old Brompton Road und war von unserem Hotel zu Fuß zu erreichen.
Der Service war sehr aufmerksam und freundlich. Die Bedienungen hatten richtig gute Laune und das spürte man natürlich sofort.
Es gibt hier gehobenere italienische Küche. Die Pasta war selbstgemacht, als Appetitanreger wurden eingelegte Tomaten gereicht. Wir hatten Pizza & Pasta bestellt und es schmeckte alles frisch und lecker. Für Londoner Verhältnisse ist dieses Restaurant durchaus bezahlbar, auch wurde hier der obligatorische Aufschlag für Service von 12,5% nicht berechnet.