In Downtown Royal Oak is a restaurant called D’Amato’s. D’Amato’s is an Italian restaurant located on Sherman Dr. The vibes of the restaurant were warm and inviting with black and white checkered flooring and dim lighting. 

We decided to get an appetizer and we chose the cheese bread. The cheese bread consisted of bread with parmesan and mozzarella cheese with fresh oregano and a buttery parmesan crust. The bread also came with a herb cream cheese spread. Our bread came out hot and buttery and smelt so good. When you pulled the pieces of the bread apart there was a nice cheese pull which made it even more appetizing. The parmesan on the crust really kept all the flavors there instead of the flavor being lost at the crust. The herb cream cheese was very good, it had hints of garlic in it. We thought that it was best to dip the crust into the herb cream cheese so that it didn’t overpower the cheesy part of the bread. I asked my friend how she thought it was, “Out of ten? Oh it broke my scale.” Overall the cheese bread was enough for two people if you are also going to get entrees. We had about seven pieces left to take home. It was also really good just warmed up in the microwave or the oven.

The menu had a lot of good options, consisting of lots of pastas, chicken entrees to even a burger. Out of all the tempting options, I decided to go with the shrimp scampi ravioli. It was ravioli stuffed with shrimp, parmesan, herbs, butter, lemon and white wine. It was topped with a tomato cream sauce, roasted red peppers, more parmesan and parsley. It was bigger ravioli spread out on a dish instead of ravioli in a bowl. The presentation was one of the prettiest ways I’ve seen ravioli. The cream and tomato sauce was spread overtop each of the ravioli and were garnished with big parmesan flakes. It was a very filling and warm dish. I don’t normally get shrimp, but that dish convinced me to try shrimp at restaurants more often. There was so much that I wasn’t able to finish all of the dish. Overall, I would get the ravioli again and I recommend it highly.

My friend decided to get the cavatappi which is D’Amato’s signature dish. It came with a chargrilled chicken breast on top of corkscrew pasta with spinach, roasted garlic cream and parmesan. The chicken in the pasta was “grilled to perfection,” my friend said.  It was tender and was easy to cut. There was the perfect amount of spinach in the dish, it wasn’t too much, but also wasn’t too little. The flavor wasn’t too over powering to where it took over the whole dish. Overall, I would recommend this dish to get a good taste of what the restaurant has to offer.

D’Amato’s was a restaurant that I will certainly revisit with my friends or family. The different dish options means that they have something for everyone.