Fratelli’s Restaurant & Bar

This is probably my favorite casual Italian restaurant in Cumberland. The portion is big and yummy!

One of our favorite hometown restaurants… the meat lasagna is always good — it’s an Italian restaurant after all, but what always surprises me is how good the steaks are… maybe the best place in the area for a great steak.
Service is typically good and the atmosphere pleasant.

I am in the area for business and both the locals and Unilocal reviews raved about this place. It is just around the corner from my corporate housing, so I thought I’d try it. I’ve done so twice so far. The first time I got lasagna and the second time I got a calzone and calamari. The lasagna came with a house salad and some uniquely shaped bread sticks. The salad and bread sticks were good. The lasagna was awful. It was dry and lacked much tomato sauce. Also, it was seasoned strangely. The second time I came I decided to go with something different. The calzone was huge. The dough/​bread was fresh, but again the cheese filling was seasoned strangely. The calamari was good and fresh. It wasn’t rubbery. The marinara sauce was too spicy for my tastes. The wait staff are attentive. I’ll try it again as some of the locals with whom I work suggested the salmon and the vodka sauce pasta.

Love the food but wanted to order to go and when I called in they would not answer so I called straight for 45 minutes or so… still no answer. While I understand it’s hard to answer during prime time I think you should at least answer and tell me to hold on or tell me your unable to take the order.

This is by far the best buffalo pizza I’ve had in the area since the old days of uncle Tucker’s.

Great Italian food. Definitely CALL AHEAD for RESERVATIONS because they are always packed! The food does not disappoint. They started out as a small Italian deli, and evolved into the restaurant you see today. Steaks are good, lobster mac & cheese is also yummy, and I definitely recommend their crab dip! However, if you want the real deal, stick to the Italian dishes — trust me! The restaurant is run by a family with LOTS of great old-​school Italian recipes, so go with what makes sense! Desserts are delish! Prices are decent for the portions and quality. Make a reservation & give it a go. Your belly will thank you later :)

Very good steaks. Their filet may well be the best in town. Excellent wine list for our preferences.

My husband and I ate there last night for my birthday. The place came highly recommended by a friend that absolutely loves the place. Atmosphere was okay, but the scent if Italian food in the making did not greet us as we entered the oddly large foyer. Our timing was good and we were seated right away. We ordered the crab dip appetizer to share. As others have noted, GREAT breadsticks, but that crab dip left much to be desired. It was not all that creamy and tasted more of fish than crab. Not much in the seasoning dept. either. For entrees I chose the seafood diablo and my husband ordered the crab cake with baked potato side. Our garden salads, which are «included» with the meal were average. Nice mix of greens with a few cukes and grape tomatoes and probably bottled dressing. When my dish arrived I tried the pasta and sauce first. It had a nice kick to it. The mussels were okay but my second bite of scallop was gritty. Next I took a bite from the large shrimp. Besides the grit, there was a very off taste bordering on spoiled. Definitely past it’s prime! I spit the bite out into my napkin and was done. I told our server about the shrimp and asked to send the dish away. I was offered something else but by this point I was just done. My husband had a great potato but his crab cake, just like the crab dip, was bland and tasted of canned crab, fillers and whitefish. If there was any true jumbo lump meat in there it was well hidden. So, perhaps this place is not tops for seafood. But to add insult to injury, after subtracting my returned entrée, the management charged me $ 8 for the salad portion of the meal that I had eaten, yet the price of a single salad is only $ 6 in the menu! While my friend swears by the dishes that she loves (none of which were our choices) I could be persuaded to give them a second try for their steaks… the aroma of which taunted us as we were getting into our car to head to the Creamery for a much needed dessert.

Good local place. Black and Blue steak was suggested by a few friends, and rightly so. Cooked right and a large tender cut of meat. I can’t wait to go back to try their house specialty, Vodka Penne.

My husband & I are always looking for new places to try & man am I glad we tried Fratelli’s. Very quaint atmosphere, great service & food.

This is one of our favorite places in Cumberland, MD. The food is reasonably priced and there is plenty of it. During the week you can just walk in but if you go on a weekend make sure to call ahead for a reservation.
One thing I really like about Fratelli’s is you can get a small or large portion of most of their pasta dishes. Since each entrée comes with delicious homemade breadsticks (seriously they are amazing) and a salad, I always get a small portion and it is more then enough.
The eggplant parmesan is really good. It’s nothing fancy but it’s fried to a golden brown, smothered in cheese, and topped with a great tomato sauce. My husband loves the large crab cake that has plenty of jumbo lump and not much filler.
The wait staff here is mostly on top of things. The weekend waitstaff is attentive and on top of things. Occasionally on the weekdays we get someone who is slow or doesn’t refill our drinks.
All in all this is our favorite Italian dinner spot in the area and the price is right!

Just skip it.
Inexperienced and unfriendly waitstaff seemed bored and bothered, and made a complete joke out of the wine presentation. While the atmosphere was generally decent, the booth seating was so far away from the table that it made it awkward to try to balance yourself on the edge of the seat to try to eat. This restaurant tends to fill up fast, and the noise level is at a constant dull roar. Not a good fit if you’d actually like to talk to your dining companion. The food has gone very downhill from my first visit just over a year ago. The bruschetta trio that wowed us on our first visit has been reduced to some large, crudely chopped hunks of tomato thrown on some tired looking, dried out bread. When we made a complaint about my husband’s entrée (which was not edible), we were told there was no problem, as nobody else had complained. Save your time and money!

RECOMMENDED: As a local here are some tips: CALL AHEAD! GET RESERVATIONS! There is no secret to the fact this is an area hot spot. Their food is very good, the drinks are good, and the wait staff is average. I usually get spaghetti or chicken parmesan. Both are well-​seasoned but a couple of times my guests found their meals to be over-​salted or somewhat room-​tempearture. Once again, I didn’t have an issue.
The price range varies. Some items come with a big price tag for the area, others do not. Overall I recommend this place. Meals are good, family is a great bunch.

I have eaten at Fratelli’s numerous times while in Lavale. It’s a little pricy but the best Italian restaurant I have been too. Only one off dinner out of many. Great house salad and the vodka sauce is great.

This is my favorite restaurant in the area. I love the food. Fratelli’s has special dishes that never disappoint; my favorite special was the bbq brisket with cole slaw. It wasn’t ordinary and had and upscale interpretation of a homely meal. The steaks are always great. And I always get drink (Cosmo). Don’t forget to tip the bartender.

Good food a very nice atmosphere, they are a little inconsistent with the tastes but the waitstaff more than makes up for this issue.

Co-​worker and I in town for business had dinner there Monday night. My co-​worker had French Onion soup and raved about it. She also indicated that the mozzarella, tomato and basil sub was very good.
I had the black and bleu filet with sauted mushrooms. WONDERFUL.

I came to Fratelli’s the night before the Iron Girl Rocky Gap triathlon with a plan to carbo load on some good Italian pasta! I don’t really have any specific complaints about this place it’s just pretty generic and I would not really choose to eat here if I wasn’t specifically looking to load up on bad for you food.
We started with crab dip which was actually quite good. The bread with it was delicious, some kind of garlic bread. Then I had shrimp scampi. Which again was good but nothing of note. My biggest complaint is that the sauce looked a little congealed like it had been pre-​cooked and then sitting under a heat lamp. Not the freshest food in the world, but again, good if you’re looking for something bad.
No complaints about the service. We had a very nice waitress who was attentive to us and got us in and out pretty fast which is always appreciated when you have a toddler!

We had dinner here Monday night, and the place is obviously popular, because when we arrived at 7:00, the large lot was packed, and we had to wait for someone to pull out before we could park. I wish I could say that the food was good as the crowded lot would have you think, but –
Well, the garden salad was fresh, the calamari was crunchy, with a spicy dipping sauce, the house garlic bread was dense and chewy (that’s a good thing), but –
Then we come to the main course. Both my wife and I ordered salmon, and mine was so dry and overcooked I stopped eating it a third of the way through, and made as if I was stuffed from the salad, bread and appetizer, because I didn’t want my hosts to think I hated one of their favorite restaurants. In actuality, though, I’d have kept eating had the entrée been decently prepared. My wife, who also ordered the salmon, felt the same way about hers.
We took what remained of both entrees home (more than half of each, really), and while I wouldn’t eat it, she was able to make a lunch out of it, but only after dousing it with mayonnaise to moisten.
Had our entrees been better prepared, I might have raised the rating here to a 3-​star rather than a 2-​star. Because of its apparent popularity, and the fact my friends love it so much, I’d give it another try if they tried to get us there again … though I definitely wouldn’t order the fish for an entrée.

Just ate there. Caesar salad mediocre. I got shrimp diablo. Good kick but little taste. Husband got meat lasagna. That was pretty good. Service was good. Ambiance a little odd — kind of like a pool hall meets an old hotel restaurant from the 70s — w/​strange modern-​ish art on the walls. Odd place.