In my opinion you can't rely on reviews on the net. Your asking American tourists where to eat in Rome. Ask them for directions to the Piazza del Popolo, and you're likely to get a blank stare. That's your least reliable type of information.

It's like asking an Italian tourist who just came back from three days visiting New York City in the Times Square neighborhood, two days in Chicago, and two days in San Francisco at Fisherman's Wharf, what the best places to eat are in those cities. Right now TripAdvisor is showing a gelato shop near the Spanish Steps that buys ice cream from a factory and sells it as gelato to tourists as being the #1 top rated restaurant in all of Rome. That's what you get when relying on reviews from the net.

I wondered why a query such as this only had two responses, when it seems that there would be dozens of recommendations for romantic, special occasion restaurants in Rome.

For me, I couldn't answer it because although I'm sure it wasn't OP's intent, as worded it seemed as if he was asking for a recommendation for a bad restaurant, not a good one.

I can't get around the "tiny portion" size comment. In Italy the portions are very small. That isn't regional. North, South, East, West, if the size of the dish isn't much smaller than what you would get in an "Italian" restaurant in the USA then you are eating junk food in a tourist trap. The location may be romantic, but the food will not be.

Italian food earned its reputation because of the quality of the ingredients. Quality ingredients means expensive. Therefore, to keep things affordable, good restaurants keep portions small. Tomatoes ripen in the summer. A good restaurant in Rome will source them from a local farm, probably picked that day or within the past day or two.

Fresh, local products is what makes Italian food rock. You can get fresh tomato based sauces at good restaurants the winter, but a good restaurant won't just buy industrial, canned tomatoes. They will be reliably sourced and preserved for off season use.

Fresh, locally produced food from a reliable source would not be cheap if served in Olive Garden or Cheescake Factory size portions. Even things as simple as a fresh tomato, fresh parsley (not the dried stuff from a jar), and parmigian or pecorino-Romano cheese grated on the pasta as soon as it comes out of the boiling water so that it melts and covers every strand, not the stuff grated days before and spooned onto semi-cold pasta at your table, can taste like food of the gods, if the ingredients are great.

High quality means small portions, or else a typical Italian resident wouldn't be able to afford to eat in their own neighborhood restaurant. Italians take their food seriously. If you get a large portion, you stepped into a tourist trap that is substituting quantity for quality.

There was a NY Times article peripherally related to this about six months ago. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/23...referrer=&_r=0

If you cook Italian food you know that a portion size of pasta is 100 grams. If you have a 500 gram box, you have enough for five. If cooking for two, you use 2/5ths of the box. On a Cheesecake Factory website they list their pasta portion size as 1000 grams. In other words if you eat there you get a portion size that feeds an Italian family of ten. Olive Garden lists their portion size as 500 grams, enough to feed a family of five.

If these places used the quality of ingredients that a good restaurant uses in Italy, those bowls of pasta would cost you $50-100 dollars. In the USA, from pizza to pasta, they generally serve gigantic portions by using the cheapest ingredients possible. And that largely accounts for the difference in taste between the unpalatable Italian food here, and the exquisite dining experiences in Italy.

Olive Garden was recently called out for not even salting the water they boil the pasta in just to save a few tenth's of a cent per plate by saving money on salt. Salt raises the boiling point of water so that the pasta can be cooked more quickly and not be water soggy and mushy from having too much immersion time. Salt in the water doesn't stick to the pasta and make it salty. It's just how an Italian chef increases the boiling point of water. Big plate restaurants get people to go there by serving enormous portions, but the higher the quality the smaller the portions will be.

Italian cooking doesnt spare the butter, oil, or cheese, and the typical Italian breakfast is pastry if anything, but italy doesn't have our obesity epidemic because they eat small portions, but of great stuff.

A person cannot say they want a recommendation for a great Italian restaurant in Italy, but they want a large portion. It's not in accordance withbitalian tradition. The competition between local, authentic restaurants is not about size, but about quality and preparation of ingredients.

If someone says they want a recommendation for a nice meal but they, "don't like tiny portions," as far as Italy goes, it's like asking someone to give them a recommendation for a bad restaurant.

It would help to know the area where OP is staying. The Testaccio neighborhood tends to be a good place to eat. It's a working class neighborhood, too far for almost all tourists who are staying in the historic center of Rome to walk to, so the the restaurants there mainly caters to locals.

Josephineperry' recommendation of Felice is an excellent one because it is one of the best restaurants in Testaccio. You can't go wrong there, but I don't think it's very romantic. Flávio, one of their top cooks left and opened his own place, Flávio al Velavalvedotto in the same neighborhood that is even better. Either one is worth the cab ride if you're not up to the walk through a sketchy neighborhood and the near certainty of getting lost on the way to find them.

Flávio has a nice outdoor patio, and in July it won't be too hot. During the Roman summer diners' preference at such places is for the outdoor, not the indoor seating because most local, neighborhood places don't have air-conditioning, and it's much cooler outdoors in the evening. Good restaurants don't open before 7- 8 PM, and it will have started to cool down, and the weather is usually perfect.

OP had a good experience at Trastevere but beware of eating there now without doing your homework. It is one of the most beautiful areas of Rome because it is so old, and it was virtually undiscovered in the 70's and 80's, but those days are over.

Now, most of the restaurants are the same type of tourist traps you find near the Colisseum, Fountain of Trevi, Spanish Steps, etc. Great restaurants are still there, but as in much of Rome, if you just wander into a place you will not find the great food that Italy is famous for. You have to do your homework.

In my opinion TripAdvisor should not be used to find restaurants, it should be used to exclude them. If TA rates a restaurant highly, with few exceptions, that's a strong reason not to go.

Also, it's almost as bad to use certain multi-country guidebooks like Fodor's, etc. Their writers are typically an American sent to a foreign city for a visit of a few days who writes about it, then goes off to another country. How does visiting a city for a few days make someone an expert on where to eat there?

There are great, independent food critics who haved lived in Rome for decades who write in English, who have eaten thousands of bad or mediocre meals in Rome, but who have also found hundreds of great ones. They have their fingers on the pulse of the city's restaurant scene. They do this for a living. There are great sources of information out there.

Elizabeth Minchilli and Katie Parla come to mind. You can download their apps or books for just a few dollars. It's worth doing that before wasting 25 times that amount eating a super-sized portion of food in a tourist trap. You can also go to their free websites and get lots of info.

Rome Digest is another website in English, written by Romans who are independent, that also comes to mind. Not in English but if you don't speak Italian you can cut and paste into Google Translate and try to make do, is the website, "Dissapore, Niente č Sacro Tranne il Cibo." It means, "I disagree, nothing is sacred except for food." It is great not just for Rome, but for all of Italy, like where to eat in Milan if going to the Expo, etc. I'll admit it's not designed for tourists and can be difficult for non-Italian speakers, but it can be worth the effort. The reviews are by top food critics, not Joe who just got off of a cruise ship that stopped in Rome for two days and wants to tell everyone on TA what the best pizza is, "in all of Italy."

There are romantic, economical restaurants in Rome, suitable for an anniversary with roof top views overlooking the Colosseum or Forum that aren't "stuffy" budget-busting Michelin Star restaurants that you can go to, providing that as always in Italy, you have a reservation.

But I just don't know how to recommend them because the portion sizes are Italian, not American style, and that means small. I don't know how to respond to a query asking for a memorable restaurant that has great food in large portions, and that would be considered "stuffy" simply because it earned a Michelin star. Eataly in Torino is a food mall similar to a Macy's, and it has a Michelin star. Having great food doesn't mean you are stuffy.

There are many cozy, casual, budget-friendly restaurants with fantastic food, suitable for an anniversary in Rome, but not if portion size is a criterion standard for meaning good food, and good food is equated with meaning stuffy.