Da Baffone Cucina Italiana is a family-owned Italian restaurant located in downtown Crystal Lake, Illinois. At Da Baffone we offer all the wonderful flavors of Italy with a focus on Southern Italian cuisine. We believe that food is a tradition that brings family and friends together.
Story
Lifer's Hosted Events
Welcome to McHenry Life, where you can share your McHenry County experiences and find new ones. If the listing you are looking at is for your business, organization, or event, please feel free to click the "Claim Listing" button to start the process of claiming your listing!
1 Shared Experience on “Da Baffone Cucina Italiana”
Brian R. Brown
da Baffone has long been one of our favorite restaurants in town. With COVID concerns though, we had not been back for a long while.
It was a delightful return, mostly. Service was excellent as it usually is. Jill enjoyed a French – tini and I had the first dirty gin martini that I’ve had for quite some time.
Excellent bread and house salads to start, followed by tortellini for Jill, a huge kid’s portion of spaghetti and giant meatball for the boy, and I enjoyed the gamberi & capesante alla sicilliana (sauted shrimp and sea scallops) which was amazing. Finishing it all off with the chocolate chip cheesecake, which even for a New York style cheesecake purist like myself, I have to admit it was superb. All in all, a truly wonderful dinner.
Sadly, an otherwise perfect evening started off on the wrong foot when Jill made the reservation. Now, we still remember when you didn’t need a reservation and I still remember the first time we stopped in and weren’t able to get in because we didn’t have one… which left us both disappointed but also thrilled at the success they had found. We were making the reservation for 5:45 on a Friday night, but before hanging up, whoever she spoke to on the other end finished with a rather “put out sounding response” about how that was fine, but we would have to be out by 7:45 though.
Is unfortunate that this sole interaction started the whole evening off on a sour note. With only 3 of us, it would seem highly probable that we would be in and out without issue, which we were.
We will just write this off as a fluke and will of course be back. Grazie