BAY CITY, MI — This isn’t the first time Roma’s Family Restaurant has been featured in MLive’s “Michigan Best Local Eats,” but one of the restaurant’s signature dishes is too good to leave un-discussed.

The family-owned restaurant is best known for its pizza, pasta and perch on Fridays, enough so to draw the attention of our last story, but the steak sandwiches offered have been a staple of the business since its inception in 1962.

Located at 1209 Broadway St. in Bay City, owner Joseph Gulino said the sandwiches have been so important to the family that the variations have grown to become a community favorite over the past four decades that he’s been in charge.

RELATED: Michigan’s Best Local Eats: Roma’s Family Restaurant is known for pizza, pasta and perch on Friday

Gulino said the origins of the restaurant stem back to when his parents initially emigrated from their home in Partinico, a branch off of the City of Palermo, Sicily, in southern Italy to be closer to their family who had already moved to Bay City.

He said much of the menu was created by his mom, Gina, and his dad, Sal, who, to this day, each have sandwiches named after themselves.

One item Gulino said he had a hand in creating is the “Roma golden steak sandwich.”

He said the sandwich, which has been on the menu for roughly the last five years, was meant to be an alternative without the regular tomato pasta sauce found all over the roster of Roma steak sandwiches.

The Roma golden combines a steak sandwich patty with several strips of bacon, fried onions and a blend of American and mozzarella cheeses.

Before being squeezed between two toasted slices of Italian-style bread; all that cheesy, gooey deliciousness is topped with the secret Roma golden sauce, a mustard-based barbeque sauce, something Gulino said was created after testing the sandwich with more than a dozen other sauce blends.

“I don’t know how it originally came up, but we decided we would add a new original,” Gulino said. “All of our sandwiches are usually made with spaghetti sauce and I wanted to give diners another choice.”

The Roma golden has grown to be one of the most popular, if not the most, steak sandwiches on the menu and comes with a side of freshly baked garlic bread, made in-house by the rest of Gulino’s family.

He said when he’s not in the building, visitors can likely find themselves being served by one of his granddaughters or having entrees made by one of his daughters.

If by chance you run into one of the waitresses who don’t share blood-relation with the Gulinos, he said in most cases they’ve been working closely with the restaurant for more than 30 years and have become family in the process.

Another dish that many who stop by Roma’s frequently demand on their way out the door by far: homemade garlic sticks.

While many of the dishes are built with Italian bread or come with a side of crispy garlic bread, the garlic sticks are made from the soft, fluffy pizza dough crafted by Gulino’s nephews. Without going into too much detail, the combination of the sweet bread and the light-but-stimulating garlic flavor is one you really need to taste to believe.

Gulino said most times the garlic sticks are sold alongside the ever-popular hand-tossed pizzas, but many people order them alone.

“We sell a lot of big party pizzas and a lot of steak sandwiches, all unique to each other and created by mom and dad,” Gulino said. “We’ve got the chili, the big bowls of spaghetti and meatballs, both chicken tortilla and French onion soups. Our top sellers are the French onion and our stuffed peppers, but the garlic sticks are never far behind.”

Roma’s Family Restaurant is open from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and closed Sunday and Monday. Visit romasbaycity.com to learn more.

Would you like MLive to feature your restaurant in Michigan’s Best Local Eats? Send details, including business name, address and most popular menu item, to Heather Jordan at hjordan@mlive.com.

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