Not sure about Pompeii specifically but from what I've heard of food in the Roman empire, tastes have changed dramatically since then. I'm afraid a historic restaurant would often be either disgusting or very far from historical. There might exist more common ground, but people in the empire ate things like field mouse.
If you enjoy modern foods from all around the world, it's very unlikely that you wouldn't enjoy Roman food. Things have changed since 2kya, but not that much. Although ingredients and tastes have changed somewhat, many of the same food products are used in extremely similar forms in exactly the same region. Not everyone was chasing the complexity of the elite Roman table. And to those who claim that complex flavors like garum are now out of vogue or disgusting, I present the modern equivalent: colatura di alici (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colatura_di_alici), an ingredient in classic, typical dishes from south Italy.
I've had cui (mostly to share pictures). I thought it was good, but idk how field mouse would be. Cui (guinea pig for the uninitiated) has a decent amount of meat on it. Field mice are so tiny, a chicken wing has has to have more meat on it. I'm presuming that when they ate field mice 2000 years ago, they're eating the entire thing with all organs except for maybe the intestines.
The mice were fattened in a special vessel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glirarium) which tricked them into preparing for hibernation, which fattened them up significantly. Still probably not a lot in them.
The list of foods in the article sounds fine for modern tastes (apart from the snails maybe). I'm sure it would have been prepared very differently, but that never stopped us calling things "Chinese food" etc in the west.
Lots of nicer places serve snails where I am in the Southern US. You can buy cans of them at the grocery and all you need is the shells to serve them in. A little garlic and parsley butter is all you need.
> but that never stopped us calling things "Chinese food" etc in the west.
I once collected a quote from a writeup on dailywtf, an aside that went:
"I should mention that I mean real Chinese food, not that non-deep-fried stuff they serve over in China."
The intended joke, obviously, is on people who think the American label "Chinese food" must reflect something similar to the food they have in China.
After spending years in Shanghai, eating local food, seeing the ads in bakery windows for "FRIED COOKIES", I still find the quote funny, but mostly for the idea that they might serve non-fried food in China. There is some, but it is most certainly not the norm.
Almost always prepared "French style" with garlic-butter sauce which kind of masks the true flavor of the snail. By themselves the snails have a mild vegetative flavor with a bit of umami.
The only other preparation I've heard of was pickling. And also in frittata (omelet). It would be interesting to know how the Romans prepared snails.
