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Il Postale
Category:
Restaurants
127 W Washington Ave
Sunnyvale, California
(408) 733-9600
Probably the best Italian place in Sunnyvale
Probably the best Italian place in Sunnyvale
Il Postale consistently ranks as the best Italian place in Sunnyvale, CA, and they're not afraid to tell you about it. The place is located in downtown Sunnyvale across from Macy's parking lot, which...
Il Postale consistently ranks as the best Italian place in Sunnyvale, CA, and they're not afraid to tell you about it. The place is located in downtown Sunnyvale across from Macy's parking lot, which provides for plenty of available parking spots at any time of day. The interior is quite nice, surrounded with paintings on brick walls and large wine bottles stashed everywhere in the range of visibility. They also have a full bar with the full selection presented to the customers.
The tables are white cloth, and there's complimentary white bread that comes with oil and vinegar. The wine list, as expected from an Italian place, is extensive, and the menu is quite diverse and doesn't concentrate on pastas or pizzas, as you'd expect anything Italian to feature.
The dinner menu is available here http://ilpostale.com/page/ny84/Starters_Dinner.html and the food itself left an excellent impression. Everything was cooked just perfect, had the right sauce and was generally a pure delight to eat. The service was very good and friendly.
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Del Monte Restaurant offers a mix of Mediterranean and Central European cuisine
If you walk down Murphy Ave in Sunnyvale, Del Monte is pretty easy to miss or dismiss as just another hole in the wall. Behind the dark glass, however, is an elegant and friendly Mediterranean place...
If you walk down Murphy Ave in Sunnyvale, Del Monte is pretty easy to miss or dismiss as just another hole in the wall. Behind the dark glass, however, is an elegant and friendly Mediterranean place that's apparently owned by people descending from Croatia (former Yugoslavia) and therefore featuring quite a wild variety of food.
The menu is available on the restaurant Web site http://www.delmonterestaurant.com/menu.html and don't be afraid to ask the waiter for the explanation of any item. We tried Cevapcici Croatian Style, which turned out to be mini-sausages made out of various kinds of meat and prepared fresh, quite tasty for an appetizer.
The Scampi Provencale and the sturgeon (not on the menu, but offered to us during the daily specials recital) were quite good, served with steamed vegetables and some mashed potatoes on the side. The portions are all about presentation, and the large plate was sprinkled with parsley. The service was a bit slow, but they had just one waiter for roughly 12-14 tables that were in the restaurant that night.
The interior is nice, clean, and well kept. This is a white cloth place, and it has a pretty good wine list. Most of the menu is available online on the restaurant Web site.
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Good Mexican food, but a bit bland-tasting
La Fiesta is a bit off beaten path, and welcomes the casual visitors with a parking lot for about a dozen cars. The place seems to mainly pitch margaritas and other drinks typical for Mexican places,...
La Fiesta is a bit off beaten path, and welcomes the casual visitors with a parking lot for about a dozen cars. The place seems to mainly pitch margaritas and other drinks typical for Mexican places, which is usually a bad sign for the quality of the food. Turns out, my premonition was correct.
It's not that the food is outright bad, it's just bland-tasting and doesn't offer any differentation to make La Fiesta stand out. However, there were some positive things about the place as well. Four salsas definitely beats Fiesta Del Mar's three salsas, but the service is quite slow to replace the empty chips baskets even when not too many customers are around.
The interior looks well kept and is quite colorful, generally what you'd expect from a family Mexican place. Overall, La Fiesta is a good place to go if nothing else is available.
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Great place to try fresh seafood in Monterey
Located on Fisherman's Wharf in Monterey, CA, Isabella's has to try hard to attract the customers among competing places with similar fresh-seafood menus, and it does a pretty good job. The menu is...
Located on Fisherman's Wharf in Monterey, CA, Isabella's has to try hard to attract the customers among competing places with similar fresh-seafood menus, and it does a pretty good job. The menu is quite extensive, offering many fresh seafood choices, with crab and lobster at market prices.
The interior of the restaurant is quite upscale for a wharf location, and overall we got a great service. The butter garlic dungeness crab was a specialty that day, and it's definitely worth trying out, if you feel like having a big meal, since the crabs served are generally pretty large.
The restaurant doesn't offer a good selection of alcoholic or specialty drinks, but it's well compensated by their wine selection. Wines were generally overpriced, since they figured out that when you get great food combined with the view of Monterey Bay, you'd want to complement it with a nice bottle no matter what.
The dessert selection is pretty good, with about 7 desserts brought out on a specialty tray. The helper to the waiter (not the waiter himself) turned out to have very little knowledge of the dessert names and ingredients, but the waiter made excellent recommendations.
Isabella's has quite a few outside seats, that turned out to be too windy when we were there at lunch hour. However, the fast-changing weather is compensated by the view of sea lions and departing whale-watching boats.
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Great food in casual surroundings
Gilbert's offers a combination of ice cream / gelato / frozen yoghurt shop with Wharf-side entrance, and a restaurant/bar facing the Monterey Bay. Generally a place offering the clam chowder outside...
Gilbert's offers a combination of ice cream / gelato / frozen yoghurt shop with Wharf-side entrance, and a restaurant/bar facing the Monterey Bay. Generally a place offering the clam chowder outside might seem like desperate for customers, but in case of Gilbert's it's just a case of advertising really good fresh seafood.
The menu offers a good variety of fresh seafood items, with some items market as restaurant's specialty. The atmosphere is quite casual and friendly, the appetizers are good, and the entree items are generally not on the expensive side, between $15 and $35. They have a pretty good wine selection, featuring some local wines from Monterey area.
The fresh clam chowder is worth trying out, as this is the cafe specialty, as well as hot crab bake - a concoction of crab meat, shrimp and other seafood served hot on the sourdough. During the night time the view from the windows offers quite a nice picture of Monterey lights.
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A Monterey Hotel that's close to everything that matters
When you visit Monterey, you probably have a certain list of places to visit and things to try. Monterey Bay Aquarium is probably on that list, as well as Monterey Fisherman's Wharf, followed by...
When you visit Monterey, you probably have a certain list of places to visit and things to try. Monterey Bay Aquarium is probably on that list, as well as Monterey Fisherman's Wharf, followed by downtown. Monterey Hotel is conveniently located within walking distance from all the places of interest in Monterey, and since it's right downtown, getting a cup of coffee in the morning or having a quick bite generally means crossing the street.
The hotel is historic, having been built in 1904. However, it has very nice interior, and none of the weird smells or unsanitary conditions you'd expect from old buildings. The staff is quite friendly and helpful the newcomers to Monterey to figure out their way around. The hotel lobby contains the list of all the takeout menus available in Monterey (not that you'd want a pizza delivery, having come to the seafood capital of NorCal).
The cons of being a historic hotel include the lack of elevators (not a problem for most of the people in the 3-story building) and horrendously squeaky floors. We were on the 2nd floor, and were going to bed early, due to overdose of walks on the fresh air, and I swear they held the walking competition the floor above. The room was also smaller than what you'd expect to get for similar money at a chain hotel.
There's continental breakfast served downstairs every morning 7-10 am, which includes bagels, yoghurt, cereal and a selection of fresh fruit. The hotel is within 20-30 minute walk from Monterey Bay Aquarium, and it's definitely a very nice walk on the trail by the ocean. It's realtively easy to get to from the highway.
There's no onsite parking, an the valet parking at the hotel is $16 a day. We were there for the Memorial Day weekend, and the downtown streets and parking lots are open to the public for free on weekends and holidays, so we managed to get a spot on the street right outside the hotel. If you positively cannot find any parking in the street, drive to the very end of Alvarado, and right behind the Washington Mutual building there's a public parking garage.
Hotel's advertised WiFi hotspot was not secured, but did not want to associate with my laptop even at 100% signal strength. I got Internet for maybe 10 minutes (which was manifested by all instant messengers popping windows like crazy and Yahoo! Messenger making those gun sounds notifying me of new mail) and could not get online after that, even though the wireless connection displayed 100% quality all along, which makes me think it wasn't my laptop that was the problem.
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Average food with below average service
Cafe Baklava offers a pretty good menu with various Mediterranean dishes and Turkish kebabs made out of chicken, lamb, beef and pork. They also have a pretty good variety of meats and fish prepared...
Cafe Baklava offers a pretty good menu with various Mediterranean dishes and Turkish kebabs made out of chicken, lamb, beef and pork. They also have a pretty good variety of meats and fish prepared in various Greek and Turkish sauces.
However, when you go beyond the house specialties, the food selection is pretty boring and you get the impression they're just repackaging the desserts they bought in bulk at Costco and selling to you at marked-up prices. Few of the desserts that I've tried on my visits there were a bit watery and did not make me a fun of the restaurant.
On arrival the customers are greeted with a serving of pita bread and hummus. The hummus is pretty good, although if you closed your eyes, the taste definitely reminds of guacamole sauce at a Mexican place. The quality of the entrees is ok, but nothing spectacular. Eggplant seems to be ever-present in all their menu offerings, with several entrees including eggplant as the main dish. The service is inevitably slow, and the waiters have taken a solemn oath to read the daily specials even if you already know what you want, and you explicitly tell the waiter you're ready to order.
The place does not have enough ambiance to justify for average food, and generally doesn't become one of those places that you dream of coming back to. If you want to avoid the slow and dull service at Cafe Baklava, but would still like to enjoy a good kebab, drive up Castro past El Camino to Rose's Market (across from Washington Mutual building), where they make all sorts of kebabs on open fire. They will make it faster than Cafe Baklava, too.
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