We ate there for the first time a few weeks ago. We had the fantasmic package which my husband loved doing because he got an appetizer and loves calamari. Their appetizers didn't appeal to me at all outside of the regular old salad or caprese salad. I was surprised children do NOT get an appetizer on the fantasmic package. I figured they did and told them they would and when the waitress came to get our order she said only adults got appetizers. They were pretty disappointed and stared at me like I was a liar or something! Oops. Its sort of odd because then the adults get appetizers and the children get to stare at you while you eat them I guess. They did eat bread while appetizers were served and they raided my salad for all the good stuff.
My husband is super super picky about his food. He goes to some of the top famous well known type restaurants all around the US on a regular basis so he is generally disappointed in most "common" sort places. This is especially true about steak. He is used to paying a couple hundred dollars or more per person for steak so if he goes to order steak anywhere else I always tell him it will be a mistake as it will not live up to his expectations. Well he ordered the steak here. He said that for a strip steak this was "really pretty good" now that is really high praise from him. And, even more so, he said Mama Melrose would be one place he would like to go back to next year. I was shocked. I got the pork dish and it was good. I wouldn't say I had to, hands down, order it again, but it was good enough I would consider getting it again if I decided not to try something else, if you know what I mean. My daughter got the chicken campanelle and liked it but it had too many sun dried tomatoes in it for her taste. She likes them but doesn't love them and it really did have a lot of them in it. Another of my children..actually a couple of them..had the chicken parm but I didn't get around to trying it. There weren't any complaints on it. The rest had things like spaghetti and again I didn't try it but they ate it fine.
Now the reason I didn't like the fantasmic package was you don't get to choose dessert. You automatically get the sampler. I love dessert and don't allow myself to eat it very often at all so I look forward to my vacation desserts! This was definately one place I would have loved to pick my dessert. Many great sounding choices and Italian desserts are my top favorites. The sampler desserts were very small and ok but I really regretted not being able to pick!
So our service was no so good. We had an early lunch. It was either 11, 11:15, 11:30 at the latest I don't totally recall right now....but it was early and the restaurant itself was not busy when we arrived, lots of empty tables but we had to wait quite a while to be seated. Once seated we waited a long time till our waitress showed up. She was quite scarce after her first appearance too. It took a long long time to get our food and when it arrived they had forgotton to make one of my children's plates. So they said they would get it right away...but it was like 15 minutes later when it arrived. We were all done and waiting for our waitress to get our dessert ordered up and it was forever until she appeared. I was about to get up and see if someone else could help us. By this time we were needing to leave because the children had Jedi training to be at. We had allowed over 2 hours from our reservation time until when they needed to arrive at Jedi thinking that would be plenty of time...that's how slow the whole experience was and how much we waited and waited for every step of the meal. I left with the children to get them to Jedi. My husband was going to ask if we could get dessert to go since time was up. Well I understood that the children could get either a cupcake or ice cream for dessert on the fantasmic package. When my husband arrived at Jedi with our desserts he said they never asked what the children wanted and just gave them ice cream in a little cup. Well they were in Jedi training, its 95 degrees out, that melted immediately and they didn't get dessert. It ended up being another disappointment for them after the appetizer disappointment.
I imagine we just hit a bad day where service was all around bad. SInce my husband enjoyed it and that was the only restaurant he said he would like to go back to, I plan to try again next year.
Oh one other thing we ran into was when we were there the pizza ovens were done for repair. THey were not making the flatbreads. One person from our party had been planning on getting one so they were pretty disappointed in this.