Avanzare Italian Restaurant - Lombard — Restaurant in Illinois

I don't usually find myself in the position of posting a one-star rating very often. Always try my best to find a positive at all the restaurants I visit. But in this case, I felt I needed to get this out there for others as a warning. GO SOMEPLACE ELSE!

My wife and I arrived from O'Hare for a long weekend trip to attend a friend's wedding. We were starving and wanted Italian. Reviews looked decent so decided to check it out. Pulling in the parking lot was basically empty on a Thursday night at 6PM. The place next door (a bar) was packed with patrons. It was hard to even tell if this place was even open. Normally this triggers my flight response but we decided that we didn't want to go hunting for food since we had not eaten anything since before 10AM that day.

Entering the dark building and seeing the room full of empty tables was the second warning. Again, we paused and should have run the other way. But we are diehard restaurant people so in we went. We were greeted by a friendly staff member and decided to sit outside on the patio since the weather was nice and the lighting inside was dark. The only redeeming quality of the place was the staff. Everyone was super attentive and friendly. My guess is they don't get too many visitors. A total of four different staff members checked in on us. We decided to stick with the basics... I got the grilled chicken on fettuccini alfredo and my wife got the chicken parm. The food redefines the word awful. The fettuccini was probably made the previous week and was so overcooked it turned to paste. My chicken looked like it was frozen and then microwaved. My wife's chicken parm was beaten to death before it was cooked for so long that it actually looked like wrinkled leather. It was only millimeters thick but was still hard to cut through. She didn't finish it. I should have just pushed the dish away but I ate a bunch of it (I was starving). I feel like one of those TV reality show hosts when I say...seasoning...try it sometime. The dishes had no flavor. The reviews said the Tiramisu was good so we grabbed it to go. It was good but based on the structure of the dessert, you could tell it was sourced from a bakery and frozen.

But the worst is yet to come...that night, I spent the evening in the bathroom. Yup, you guessed it...food poisoning. Now just over two weeks later I have recovered enough to start going out to eat again. We managed to make it to the wedding but we left early since I was still sick. This place needs to close down and get cleaned out. Fire the "non-cook". It's been over 25 years since the last time I had such an awful experience going out to eat. Next time, I will listen to that flight reaction and run the other way. McDonalds would have been a...

A dinner party of 12 and the service was insanely super slow. Fortunately the company we were in helped with the long wait to order, receive our food. We started off at 6pm and left the venue at 9:45pm. Obviously people were starving at this point and you’d think people would eat up their plates. The chicken Parmesan was paper thin and dried, the bread part was even drier. I was under to eat dinner after trying many times to find an edible bit. One other person order the same thing and had the same experience. The sauce looked & taste like tomatoe paste along with over cooked pasta that was clumped down cold on the plate. The white fish ordered was intially shown before deboned but when served it took forever and there were still bones through out the fish making it hard to eat and needed to be picked through. One meal stated authentic black truffles and that was far from the truth. The lentil soup was lack luster in having any type of taste. Several other guests at the table just brushed their meals with their fork side to side and then gave up. Ambiance was nice but very loud. We went the night before Mother’s Day and the place was packed wall to wall in every dining room they had in that venue with zero social distancing. People were completely packed on top of one another. No one bothered taking masks on and off, they were all off during dining. Servers left their mask on. Ideally this restaurant was not clearly following Illinois CDC guidelines with a packed venue the entire night. Quality of food doesn’t justify the price point for a restaurant that claims to be authentic. Again ambiance was nice but I don’t see myself eating...

I wanted to LOVE this place but it's not happening. When you enter the restaurant it starts strong. We visited on a Friday evening but were able to get a table. It was plenty busy but not entirely slammed. The ambiance and atmosphere of the people at the bar was really nice. You got the vibe that it was a popular hangout for locals. The food and drink menu was extensive (little too extensive if you think about having to properly execute all of those things). Unfortunately for us the Caesar salad was the best thing that we had all night. My chicken parm as you can see from the photos, didn't even have completely melted cheese. The pasta served with it was WAY over cooked, which given the thickness of those noodles I thought was quite impressive. They were practically turned into mush. Sauce was nothing notable. Being suspect of the overly extensive menu, I went with chicken parm thinking it was a tough dish to screw up. Nonetheless whoever was cooking this night proved me wrong. The risotto special was ok. Not great but not as botched as my Parm. This food is mediocre at best. Which is fine. There have to be mediocre restaurants but they shouldn't be charging with they are charging for these dishes if they're just going to put out mediocre food and completely overcooked pasta. Service was good, the busser and runners were extremely attentive (suspect relationship to ownership but just a guess).

Solid 3 stars. You can put out mediocre food but you need to charge mediocre prices, or improve the quality of what's exiting the kitchen and keep on charging. Either way something's...