Before I tried this place, I initially only heard great things about it from my roommate. It wasn’t until the end of the year, when my friends and I decided to all go out to eat at a nice place and it came down to Il Fornaio.
Il Fornaio is the perfect place for nice Italian. It is much nicer than Olive Garden, yet not much more expensive. It offered a large variety of Italian food, which I was lucky to try a lot of (the benefit of eating with a lot of people). The atmosphere is perfect, not too rowdy like many popular restaurants, and very laid back (but still excellent service). They also offer a specials menu that changes often (which i ordered from), from which I ordered delicious rigatoni.
I also want to add that as I was adding the brunch menu, it sounded very tasty.

My daughter and I really like the food at all of the Il Foraio restaurants that we have tried (Coronado, Santa Monica, and Del Mar), but we have found the attitudes of and service by the restaurant staff at the Del Mar location to be unpleasant. The staff members that we dealt with were pretentious, unpleasant and inefficient. We waited so long for service the last time that we ate there, that we almost gave up and left. Our water and tea glasses were never refilled, and our salad plates were left sitting on the table during the entree even though we asked for them to be removed. My daughter loves the French Toast served at Sunday Brunch, but if not for the Pasta Putanesca, and that it is a long drive to another Il Fornaio location, I wouldn’t go back.