Marcello’s – Northbrook

Ordered carry out after giving this place a rest for a year after they screwed up an order. Tonight my wife ordered a carry out and they said it would be ready in 35 minutes. An hour later, she is still waiting. When she complained, the manager said, «you don’t want it? I’ll cancel it now.» Great customer service don’t you think? Worst service and customer regard in the area. We are done with this place and will tell everyone.

They catered an event for us. Everything was included, and they were a pleasure to deal with. I highly recommend them.

While waiting, one of my moms friends offered me a free slice of square pizza which is certainly the highlight.
Ordered the spaghetti and meatballs, none of which was really homemade. Ordered to go, and found my side Cole slaw was absolutely past its expiration. Ever hear the saying: «you can judge a restaurant based on its cole slaw?» Yeah, pretty much how I felt.

We have been going to and ordering from Marcello’s in Northbrook for years. We have always considered their food to be overpriced, but good, so we have continued to go there. Not anymore. Tonight, as part of our delivery order we got smiley potatoes. When they arrived, there were only 6 in a 10×10 box. We thought that there must have been a mistake, so I called the restaurant. The person who answered the phone told me that one order is six smiley potatoes (for 3 dollars, and they are the size of a silver dollar). I asked to speak to a manager. He told me the same thing, that one order was 6. When I pointed out that each one as 50 cents, his response was, «You could have cooked dinner.» Unbelievable. Never again, Marcello’s.

Heard great things about their broasted chicken. We got that and some brisket. Both were okay.
Wings — I’d much rather take the trip to Evanston.
Brisket — I’m heading to Lake Zurich or down to the city.
Oh well it was worth a shot.

I am so disappointed! The last several times I have ordered for delivery have been subpar, but this evening beats all. Delivery took 1hr 20min. All food was cold. Pizza inedible. Cinnamon ticos are hardened brown sticks of bread with no cinnamon sugar on them. Apple pie looks as if it were used as maracas. Then I tried to call and speak to manager. After Justin explained to me in several different ways how he was not empowered to help me, he disconnected me when trying to get the GM on the phone. I have been ordering for many years and have been a loyal customer, but things have gone way downhill over the past year.

Just got off the phone with a manager named Jason. I placed a catering order and just wanted to say that he was so helpful and nice over the phone. We eat at the restaurant a lot but never ordered it in for a large group. He helped me decide how much to order but mostly just thought he was so pleasant. Love giving business to people who are kind. I’m sure the food will be great! Thanks Jason!

Marcello’s has the best broasted chicken I have ever had. The chicken is so juicy and the breading is extremely crispy. I love getting a 16 piece of the broasted chicken, taking it to go, then pigging out and gobbling it all up. They also have good ribs. Very tender and the barbecue sauce is sweet and thick. I like getting the sides of whipped potatoes and gravy and grilled asparagus. They both taste very delicious. I also enjoy the butter they have to spread on the bread they have. It has terrific flavor and nice and rich. Excellent ribs and chicken to have for sports games and parties. Pick-​up is very quick and easy.

Good food, decent portions, bus boys were attentive, but we only saw our server 4 times (never came back to ask if we wanted more drinks). We were here on a Saturday night, but there were a few open tables, so not like things were too busy. Even the bar was only about 2/​3rds full.
Pizza is made with a thin, cracker-​like crust. It was tasty, a little light on the toppings, but is pretty pricey. One in our group ordered the stuffed — said it was run-​of-​the-​mill.
No dinner salad, instead it’s coleslaw. I’m a fan, but this wasn’t anything special, and more than half our table (kids) didn’t want coleslaw, so they went to waste (server wasn’t helpful here either).

Marcellos garlic oregano broasted chicken is amazing. If you aren’t crazy about chicken on the bone, they make chicken tenders with the same preparation as a appetizer and it is fantastic. I like their thin crust pizzas but i don’t think I can universally proclaim that their pizza is the best ever. (I can make that statement with the chicken.). Their vegetarian chopped salad is huge and beautiful. Half price bottles of wine on Tuesday is fun. Kids menu isn’t cheap at $ 7.50 but it is a lot of food for the tikes so I think it is a fine value. My favorite of their pastas is with the tomato cream sauce and add oven roasted breaded bites of eggplant. Yummy. Food is fine to go but I prefer to dine in here. The booths are comfy if you can snag one.

One of my family’s favorite spots to eat! Nestled in a little strip mall in downtown Northbrook, is where you will find this hidden gem! Huge menu selection and awesome food! You must try the Italian sausage and peppers appetizer to start! It’s amazing! The broasted chicken is delish, as well is the ribs! You will not be disappointed!
The service is awesome, and the owners are super nice! My 10 year old son wrote them a letter to tell them they were his favorite place to eat. They sent him a giftcard and posted his letter on their Facebook page!
I love this place!

Great Food, Great Service and the most friendly staff and management
Of any restaurant I have been to in years. Just go once and you will be hooked. Don’t be surprised that everyone knows each other. There are no strangers here! Enjoy!

The food is fine, but the restaurant isn’t clean. There’s garbage everywhere and the environment isn’t clean overall. The waiters and staff are rude and don’t care at all about the customers. I have a sister that worked there over the summer about a year ago and the owner didn’t treat her well, and the staff didn’t interact with each other at all.

Go to Marcello’s for Broasted Chicken, Flatbreads, and Pizza. If you stick to these three things you won’t be disappointed.
While I haven’t tried everything on their menu the things that I have tried were only so so. But I have never been disappointed with their thin crust pizza (get normal pizza and not stuff like Thai Chicken), flatbreads, and broasted chicken. We come back again and again for those three.

My husband is a Chicago native and one of his favorite places is Marcello’s in Logan Square. Whenever we visit Chicago, Marcello’s is one of our go-​to spots for pizza, especially because they have Abbé’s gluten-​free menu that accommodates my son and me. We stayed overnight in Northbrook, so when I saw a Marcello’s nearby, I knew we had to get dinner there. Since it was late, we ordered ahead of time to pick up. When we got there (on time) we had to wait nearly a half hour till the order was ready. I’m an understanding person– not everything goes right and things happen– so this wasn’t even going to deter me from enjoying my night. But when it came to our order itself, I’m not sure this restaurant should even carry the Marcello’s name. We ordered two things: a gluten free pizza and an apple pizza dessert. The pizza was BURNT– inedible crust burnt– and the apple pie dessert was actually brownie pizza. I went back inside to try and make the situation right and instead I got a grumpy guy at the bar who blamed everything on the «…incompetent kitchen staff» (I omitted the rest of the rant, curse words included). He basically told me take it as is or I was gonna have to wait up to 45 minutes because they were busy. So much for a remedy! We ended up going back to our hotel room, picking the burnt cheese off of the pizza and eating some of the brownie. The brownie was edible, even if it wasn’t what we ordered, so they get a star for that.
Furthermore, I emailed Marcello’s about this experience and never got a response. Such a shame; the Marcello’s name really isn’t just great food, it’s a great experience, and this location just didn’t live up to expectations. I won’t be returning to this location.

:c I don’t usually apologize for bad reviews but I will for this one because everyone here is nice and the restaurant looks nice too.
I was given the wrong dish even though we were the only ones there and I had confirmed the order with the server. But the dish I got was essentially the same. I’m not taking stars off because of a mix-​up. I am, however, taking stars off for taste. The food is… not good here. The pasta I got looked and tasted like it was sad and so did my partner’s panini. Wilty, bland, tired– some of the better characteristics of our food.
An interesting point was the garlic sticks. I’ve never had anything like these before. Like garlic bread but crisper and stickier.

The food is excellent, especially the garlic wings appetizer and the sausage & peppers appetizers — the quantity is more than enough for your meal! Lots of TVs for the sports enthusiasts.

First time customer and I was not impressed.
The food that I ordered was actually good, but the service was horrible. As a result-​I do not plan on being a 2^nd time customer. If I am paying my hard earned money-​I expect to have Great customer service and Great food.
My suggestion to the owners would be to train your order takers to be more respectful and kind when taking orders and while accepting calls from customers who are checking on the status of their delivery order. The person who answered the telephone was very rude. If I hadn’t already paid for my food via credit card over the phone, I would have totally cancelled out my order, and took my business somewhere else.
Good Luck!

This review is for delivery style — but, mild spoilers, I suspect the experience may be better in person.
We decided to try Marcello’s delivery for a quick dinner on a busy Friday evening. Ordering online was simple enough, and the delivery was right on time. Also, on the service side, all the food was packaged up nicely to keep it as warm and put together as delivery can be, so that was good.
On the food side, we got 2 apps and a couple sandwiches to try. We had some mozzarella sticks… nothing to write home about. They seemed pretty typical of the frozen variety. The spinach artichoke dip was alright. It had a lot less of the cheese that you see in a lot of this popular app at other places, so it tasted far more like spinach and artichokes. So the appetizers were certainly a solid meh.
The sandwiches were much better. The chicken parm sandwich was a good size portion, although (likely due to being delivered) the additional marinara on the side was very necessary to help get some moisture back into the overall sandwich. Flavors were good though. The Italian panini is very much like a lot of other Italian sandwiches/​grinders/​what-​have-​you — lots of cured meats and some cheese. It was a nice sandwich.
I felt like, for the food we did get, the prices were a bit on the high side, which is taking the review down a notch overall.
At the end of the day, we had a pretty average dinner… for a little bit of an above-​average price.

So I went back here in anticipation of some good thin crust za and pasta, but was fairly disappointed. I should have expected this though since my standards for pizza are very high with Lou Mal’s, Oliveri’s and Barnaby’s in my hood.
I got the Thai chicken pizza, thinking that you can’t get anything like that around Northbrook. The flavors were pretty tasty, but the pizza itself was just ok texture-​wise. I probably wouldn’t order this again, and now that I think about it, I’m just not a huge ‘chicken-​on-​pizza’ fan. But since I liked the chicken so much when I first came here, I thought it would have been better.
The pasta was just average too. Had angel hair with marinara. They claim the sauce to be famous, but I’m not sure I could have distinguished it from a jar of sauce from the grocery store.
So, to sum it up, I was blown away by the chicken the first time I came here, and apparently I found that’s about the only thing I really like here.