Apollinare Restaurant

Food: 5
Décor: 4
Ambiance: 4
Service: 3
Value: 3.5
This place still has the best pizza I have ever tried. I desperately want to return, but this restaurant spot is about 5 iterations beyond this gem.

I’ve been here a few times before, but wont be going back again. I’ve given this place a chance on many occasions, normally i would split my time between the bar and a table but since the younger guy, I think the head bartender? and Simone left i just cant find myself to sit at the bar, those two were great, made it feel like they’ve known you forever. So i decide to sit at a table this past saturday, and it all went downhill from there. Their servers were never really their strong point, they were slower, knowledge was ok, but i couldnt really get past some of their accents. The food is also always changing lasagna and federico were my go to choices, now the federico looks like it came out of a bag, and the lasagna is either soup on my plate, or burnt, my girlfriends ossobucco was ok, but it tasted like it spent 10 minutes in a microwave.
I’d agree with many people on here, this place WAS good, in the late summer and fall but not anymore. If they want people to start coming in again they need a serious revamp, and bring Simone, and that younger guy back, they were awesome.

This place is awful. Let’s see…
1. No one waited on us for a while when we sat down… no water, no bread… nothing.
2. We got our water that we asked for FIRST about 30 minutes after asking for it.
3. The bread (that we got about 45 minutes in…) was inedible. Even after dousing it in olive oil. It was dry, crumbled apart and was clearly stale.
4. One of our wine glasses was dirty with lipstick, multiple spots of it… would have had to be blind not to see that.
5. My potato/​truffle raviolis looked like vomit and tasted like nothing. They even kind of tasted freezer burned (and the waiter had made a HUGE point of telling us that everything was freshly made on premises and that’s why it takes so long to get the food out)…And we had NO SALT on the table to even try to make it better.
6. My boyfriend’s supposed «Marguerita» pizza looked and tasted like an overly-​parmeseaned Red Baron frozen pizza.
7. Even the bathroom was awful. It was dirty, the garbage can was overflowing and people had just given up and started throwing garbage all over the floor.
Bad service can be compensated for by having amazing food, but this place was terrible all around. Do not go here! There are a million places that are better in the area.

I went here on a city food tour and the food we sampled was very good! So my bf and I went back for dinner one night. Firstly, the service was AWFUL! We had the unfortunate luck of being sat directly next to the kitchen door. So we had plenty of servers walking by us, yet none of them seemed to actually wait on us.
I got lasagna expecting it to be clutch, only to be served a bowl full of cheese and sauce essentially. I suppose they noticed we were waiting forever for absolutely everything so they gave us a free appetizer of green bean fries, but they were greasy and had too much breading on them. Nice gesture, but we won’t be back.

Do you like good food???
If yes: DON’T EAT HERE.
If you want to go pay top dollar for food you could make our of a box just because it has a nice atmosphere then this is the place for you!
I hate to be harsh but this place is no good.

After 3 visits to this attractive and appealing looking restaurant I’ve finally decided that it is terrifically awful! We will not return despite its proximity to our home. Tonight’s waitress was not only argumentative she was probably the worst I’ve known. She failed to bring any water or bread though there were NO other patrons. When we went looking for her she denied she was late! She missed completely a salad that she said my daughter never ordered in the first place though we’d even gone through a discussion of vinegar etc.
The lasagna I ordered was barely edible but not revolting– which is not what I can say about my daughter’s pizza.
Despite a conversation with the chef about the salad, the restaurant failed in any way to attempt to improve upon our lousy experience.
The emptiness of the place and the inability to even attempt to save the meal from being a complete disaster– which it was.
As I love Italian food and often crave it, it took me a while to finally admit that this restaurant must be avoided at all costs. Too bad– but after 3 horrid meals over a span of a year– NEVER AGAIN!

A-​OK is what 3 stars means on Unilocal and that is how I found the place to be, OK. It wasn’t crowded on a Friday night and I don’t mind that since Northern Liberties yuppies have 10,000 places to choose from.
I had lamb chops which were tasty and the lady had a seafood stew which was also tasty but served in a bag in a bowl. Weirdo. I guess they cook the food in bags? WTF? It was good but oddly served, they said it was the best way to serve it so I’ll let them keep believing that.
Service was friendly enough, when the waiter found out I was Italian he tried chatting to me in said language to which I was all like «Nope».
All in all it was an okay dining experience, the prices leaned towards higher end with smaller portions. I need to see more plate than food honestly but whatevs, if you can’t finish the seafood stew tie that bag up on a stick and bindle that shit home!

I went to Apollionare for dinner last week with some friends and I was absolutely amazed by the authenticity and the professionalism of these guys.
These guys are all real Italians, the food, the environment, (the furniture!) everything is Made in Italy in this place!
Being a native italian myself I was quite surprised to find some «paesani» next to my house at the piazza.
The staff is super friendly and the service is impeccable, fast and smooth.
The concept oof this restaurant is simple:
1) Everything Home made
2) Ultimate taste
3) Elegant presentation.
I got the «Caramella» as an appetizer, which in italian means” a little sweet.
This fontina cheese pastry with the parmigiano fondue just marries the truffle on the side. I highly recommend it.
Entrée I had the «strangozzi alla spoletina «, everything is home made in this place, pasta, pizza, their gelato!
My friend had a home made pizza for the wood owen and it was as thin as the original «Pizza napoletana» that you get in Naples.
My other friend had the «Ravioli in salsa di tartufo bianco»
home made ravioli stuffed with ricotta and spinach in a white truffle sauce./.
Now I don’t know how these guys get a truffle that is so good and exquisite, but the taste is just unbelievable.
A nice bottle of «Trebbiano D’abbruzzo «, some awesome Italian liqueur offered by the manager and
To conclude the night we shared their award winning dessert
LA CRESCIONDA SPOLETINA.
This is a traditional umbrian dessert with a home made vanilla gelato on top.
Light, tasty, exceptional.
Bravo bravo to Apollinare! finally a place where we can finally have a real taste of real home made Italian food!
One week I discovered this restaurant at the piazza, 4 times I ate there already ahah

I don’t have a dinner experience to review for this place, but once I had lunch here. OK, I think I’m glad I don’t have a dinner experience to review here judging by how badly my lunch went.
We went during the second street festival this summer and ecided to have pizza and a beer. Normally for pizza I would just go to Rustica down the street, but this time I wanted to sit and have my pizza with a beer. Bad idea at Apollinare. The pizza slices looked like it came from the frozen section at the local supermarket. It tasted almost as bad. the slices were tiny — and by tiny I mean meager. It didn’t seem right coming from this place as the décor was slightly fancy.
The service left a lot to be desired. I was underwhelmed. The waitress was slow, and not very friendly. There was no excuse, there was only one other customer in the whole place.
I found it surprising how bad my experience was considering how many wonderful dining competitors they have in the neighborhood.

3.5 stars
I love this area of NoLibs. The crowd and atmosphere and neighborhood are very vibrant and laid back. I took my date to this restaurant because i wanted to try something new since i’ve been to most of the restaurants in the area already, except this one. The restaurant itself has nice décor, ambiance, and a view of the brick oven. We were seated in the back next to the window. Candlelit dining type of restaurant.
I felt our server was a bit new, i could be wrong. She wasn’t on top of her game when i asked about the drink selection (wine). The menu has a lot to offer that varies from your italian chain restaurants. My date and I weren’t too hungry so we didn’t go for any appetizers or salads. the bread sufficed. ***We had multiple servers i believe. Our female server would go missing, but another guy would come ask us if we needed anything, and others would float around filling our glasses with water***
I ordered the ossobucco with polenta and my date ordered the gnocci. I do like salty things, but i think for normal diners, it would’ve been way too salty. I tried the gnocci. I thought it was good, nice and light. Overall, i had an enjoyable experience there.
Will i go back here again? Maybe if i’m in the area looking for Italian food. But overall, there are other places just doors away that serve pretty good food too.

The two stars Apollinare earned have nothing at all to do with the food– which was terrible– but because I thought the interior was nice enough (except for the terrible soft jazz in the background), and the service was acceptable.
I figured this place was at least worth a try, mostly just because I’ve walked by it so many times. After this meal, I don’t think I’ll ever give it a second chance, and I will recommend pretty much any other restaurant in the neighborhood over Apollinare.
I started with a mixed green salad– nothing fancy, right? I was craving green. What I was NOT craving, however, was some mealy tomatoes, a few shredded carrots, and some over-​the-​hill lettuces in a sea of oil. Seriously, I have never seen this much oil on anything. I’m not sure there was anything else besides oil, if there was vinegar I certainly couldn’t taste it. It didn’t taste seasoned with salt or pepper either. By the time the server came back, I’d choked down some and let her know it was disappointing– but given the poor quality of the ingredients I didn’t think it would be worth getting a second, less oil-​drenched, plate.
My date had the plate of bruschetta to start. I didn’t get the impression that any of it was outstanding. I’m not even sure we could identify what each one was, if that gives you any idea how lacking in flavor each one was.
For the main course I tried a pizza with mozzarella, artichoke and olive. I think this pizza normally comes with prosciutto but I skipped that. I was expecting something very different: fresh mozz, for one, not a congealed mass of low-​quality shredded cheese. Strike one. Strikes two and three: flavorless artichoke and olives– and the olives were clearly those pre-​sliced black olives, no good at all! Date had truffled risotto, and could barely eat it. I don’t think the chef used any other flavoring other than massive amounts of truffle oil– and really, this is an ingredient that should be used sparingly.
After this, we skipped dessert and headed next door for gelato from the newest outpost of Capo Giro.
I wouldn’t recommend this place to anyone. Sorry, Apollinare, you’ve got a lot of work to do.

The worst place to ever go to. The service is horrible. The food is semi eatable.
A 30 minute wait in an empty place for the drink menus to finally come. It took the waitress another 30 to get to the food menus
So after about an hour wait for just the menus, we were rushed to order.
The order that eventually ended up being screwed up due to some certain hearing loss of the staff.
To top it all, the chef is apparently tripping on salt, because the dead sea tastes better than his/​her soup.
Stay clear of this place and save yourself some $$.

Visited this establishment for the first time on Mother’s Day 2010. Should have known when the restaurant was virtually empty. The service was reasonable. Not great, not poor. Just what one would expect and actually deserves at a restaurant.
The salad and bread were laughable. The bread looked like Melba toast. I had better salad in the bushes as a part of the Air Force Survival School. The salad looked like weeds and the taste confirmed their look.
The food serving was paltry and the cost? Well, let’s say they would have done better to put on a mask and stick a gun in your back. It was horrible. The sad thing is I read their reviews and their menu before I went. I got what I expected. They really should try closing again, get a dose of reality, and try it again. Horrible is the best word to capture this place.

Tried this restaurant on a week night because I love Italian and live nearby. I was very pleasantly surprised after reading the previous reviews. Maybe they took the complaint to heart because the service couldn’t have been better (more water, more bread, several «is everything all rights.» The eggplant appetizer was perfect and almost
enough for a small meal. Soup was good and the pasta dishes had homemade noodles and large portions and are a delicious option for a reasonably priced meal. Lasagne from an old family recipe is offered, so there are options you’ve heard of before. Still have to check out the fish, meat and pizza offerings, but it will be hard to resist the pasta when I go back, which I definitely plan on.

Now called Apollinaire. Valentines Day, table of 6. Empty restaurant.
Food was tasty, the service was awful. The place gave up on our table right away and never bothered to recover. The second time I had to go find our waiter was when we decided to skip the remainder of our prix fixe dinner.
We were not offered menus or to order anything but the prix fixe. WE DID NOT EAT A SINGLE VEGETABLE, though other tables enjoyed salads. We were so irritated by the service, we skipped dessert. A table of 6 pissed off people needed a drink-​which we had to beg for during our terrible experience.
The owners did not come over to check on us because they clearly recognized that we were unhappy and already penning this bad review. There is no suggestions I can give this place except to go to a career coach to find out what field other than food and beverage they belong in. Its one thing to have bad service, this was just insulting. Feel free to contact me to discuss this further if you are a future diner or an owner or employee of this restaurant. I’ve e-​mailed the restaurant the next day to provide feedback and they have not returned a response as of 3÷2÷2010.

Was Vino, is now Apollinare. Only open a week under the new name and they are off to a rocky start.
Made reservations over the phone for a party of 6 for 8:30pm but nobody made any mention of the $ 50 price fixe menu then. Strike one. This might have persuaded me elsewhere considering there was only one entrée on the menu: pork. Thankfully we didn’t have anyone with dietary restrictions (Muslim, Jewish, vegetarian etc…) in our party since no part of the meal included any vegetables whatsoever. (Sadly, it was the only place we could get a last minute V-​Day reservation and now we know why.)
We arrived at the Piazza and spent 15 minutes in the freezing cold just trying to find the place, no address on 2^nd St. — the main thoroughfare there — no visible signage whatsoever. Strike two. Thankfully, once we finally found it, we were welcomed by a friendly hostess and happy to see that it was not terribly busy. There were a handful of empty tables and mostly couples celebrating Valentine’s Day and there seemed to be plenty of staff to cover the workload.
After we were taken to our seats we waited quite a while to meet our waiter and find out about the price fixe menu, another 10 — 15 minutes to get water and bread and even longer to get olive oil to go with the bread (no butter, cheese, salt/​pepper etc…) and finally ten more to get the bottled wine that came with the meal! The olive oil was poured in a plate and held in front of my face by the owner who told me to pass it down to the other end of the table. For $ 50 a head I don’t expect this type of service, especially not at the hands of a restaurateur. All told, I think five different people waited on us, the youngest of which seemed to be the best server.
Sadly, I think the real victim is the chef because I the food was obviously well-​intentioned and — initially — well prepared including what seemed like fresh-​made, eggless pasta in a nice, light tomato sauce. That was by far the best part of the meal. But by the time we got it we were so famished and it was cold so we could hardly appreciate it. My only other complaint about the food was the lack of any vegetable whatsoever on this option-​less menu, not so much as a small salad or antipasti. The table next to us had a salad so we don’t know if we were forgotten or if you just have to know someone to get your veggies.
The meal was geared towards couples for Valentine’s Day so a bottle of wine was factored into the $ 50, but split per couple, which is sort of confusing. We were given one bottle for our whole table of 6 people, which goes rather quickly. We didn’t get our second bottle until halfway through the meal, at which point we had to just ask that he bring out the other two for fear we might not see him again for another 20 minutes. He came back and said they were out of red, with no effort to compensate us despite having a FULLY STOCKED WINE BAR AVAILABLE.
By the time we finished our entrees we were the only people in the restaurant. We waited almost 20 minutes for someone to come and clear our empty plates, long enough that we decided to forego the dessert that came with the meal. We had to go seeking our waiter only find that he was having drinks with the owners on the other side of the bar.
I’ve had better service for a third of the price. In a lot of instances I might excuse a new place for minor shortcomings since some places take a few weeks to get their feet wet but for the prices on this menu and the quality of food they could be serving I found the service deplorable.

From the outside, Vino appears a bit more fancy than comfy. However, the inside feels precisely the opposite. Wood floors and huge TVs around definitely secure the lounge feel.
The personnel was a bit quirky. When our first waiter arrived to offer tap or sparkling water, I asked what beers were on tap. He said he wasn’t sure, he’d go check. He returned and said «we don’t have any beers on tap». I wasn’t really intrigued by the lack of draft beer so much as the nice young man’s oblivious nature. He was so polite and nice to us though, it was almost cute.
The pizzas were nothing to rave about, but decent. I had the Chianti, which had a delicious chianti balsamic reduction drizzled through fresh greens topping the pizza. Two noteworthy points though… Although appearing huge, the pizza was thin enough that I finished mine easily and ate three slices of my girlfriend’s. Didn’t leave feeling full. Also, the prosciutto was put on my pizza after it was already cut into slices. My butter knife and I struggled as we hacked through the perforations.
Had those pizzas been their full price ($ 14), I would’ve been disappointed about the portion size. We’ll probably head back sometime if we need something different. Otherwise, it’s just alright.

The only reason I can’t give it 5 stars is because it’s in the piazza and that would be against my knowledge of what it means to have the piazza in our neighborhood.
But…having said that, I think that Vino is really phenomenal. I’ve been there three times.
Once to have cheese and wine on a Saturday afternoon. We ordered a cheese plate, some bruchetta type of dish, and a bottle of rose. It was all delicious.
The second time to just have a glass of wine and read in the early evening.
The third time to have brunch with our brunch club. Brunch was the highlight. $ 10 brunch! You can order pizza type breakfast dishes, omelette esque dishes, frittatas, french toast, etc. All priced at $ 10. Plus they of course have brunch cocktails (which we sadly did not sample). And they could accomodate our group of 10 with no problem.
I think this place is really reasonably priced, has an excellent wine selection, and the service is really friendly.
Also — I’ve brought my friends dog there twice and we’ve sat outside with no problem. They even bring a dog bowl with water. Bonus points for sure.

Came here after a Unilocal event to have some dinner. It was close, and figured why not.
The place is really chic and cool. I like what they have done inside, although I didn’t take a picture. They have clean lines, the bar is nice, and the seating arrangement isn’t crowded. There is plenty of outside seating. The prices on the menu are very reasonable, ranging from $ 10 for pizzas (fairly large) up towards $ 20 for some entrees — good prices for a place that looks like this.
I ordered the vodka linguine and an arugula salad. Now, I cannot say I am a fan of arugula, but the quantity given in the salad was not worth its $ 7 price. I might’ve had 30 leaves. The dressing wasn’t oppressive and wasn’t a lot (how I like it). The presentation was very nice. The vodka linguine wasn’t the best I’ve had. The linguine seemed a bit firm, but overall was alright. I’m not a foodie by any means. In fact, I might have the cheapest taste/​mouth ever. But don’t let that sway you when reading my review! haha.
The atmosphere of the area is very inviting. There’s free parking, the Piazza is awesome, and Harrison the waiter was great. Overall it was a fine experience, I just wasn’t a huge fan of the food.

Anchored on the corner of the new Piazza at Schmidts in Philadelphia’s hopping Northern Liberties neighborhood is the new Apollinaire Restaurant. First the ambiance: The full window wall are actually sliding doors that permit full open-​air exposure. A few tables have been set up outside on the Piazza side of the building. Inside, the simple rustic look of the tables is complemented by the more modern structural design of the building. The bar is centrally located in the room.
Beverages: Apollinaire offers a full bar but the name of the restaurant tells the main story. Nearly 50 wines by the glass are offered, ranging in price from $ 6 to $ 32 per glass. All of these wines are also available in full bottles as are an additional 20 or so wines. Dave’s prior experience working at Vintage is evident in his great selection of wines. Both domestic and foreign varietals are available.
Food: Among the 11 appetizers on the menu, my favorite would have to be the Calamari Fritti which comes with some tempura-​cooked broccoli rabe and a hot pepper. Not to be missed! The Risotto Con Zucca with butternut squash is a bowl full of warm love! There are four panini offerings including lemon basil chicken. I usually go straight for the brick oven pizzas. You can choose one of the 5 predefined items or build your own custom pie using one of 30 gourmet ingredients including artichoke hearts, capers, goat cheese, roasted eggplant and broccoli rabe. I have tried 3 of the listed pizzas and designed one of my own. All were thoroughly delicious.
This is a great place for a date or happy hour after work. If the weather is warm and the ball game is on, sit at one of the outdoor tables and watch the game on the Piazza’s jumbotron HDTV.