Went to Capone's for dinner before a concert over the weekend. Walked in roughly 40 mins before our reso was supposed to be expecting to just grab a drink at the bar, luckily they had our table ready. It was fairly early on Friday (530pm) so they weren't busy at all.
I've always liked dining at Capone's but haven't been since last summer> Since then; it seems like they priced the fall menu much higher than they have before.. I was surprised how over priced everything was. Once the food came out I was even more surpirsed because it was pretty much the same food it's always been. Nothing special, still great but nothing amazing. For example, we had the sambucca prawn ($17) 6 smaller sized prawns with a bit of roe and in a cream based reduction.. It was very good but again, $17? We ordered a variety of other appy's and entrees inlcuding the Bison tenderloin, pizza, ftr soup, salad, carpaccio etc etc.. all in my opinion $5 - $8 bucks over what it should be.
Anyhow the service was good, our server offered us bread,we accepted but it was still frozen in the middle - she exchanged out bread for something"fresher" and we were happy.
Overall a nice time, but disappointed over the price hike, I don't mind spending money on dinner but Capone's wouldn't be my first choice.
I do have to say that I will definalty be back but maybe just for a martini after work.

Capone's is a jazz club nestled in the heart of Yaletown on Hamilton Street. Overall, my experience here was enjoyable. The music was great, the food was good and the service was OK. The manager who seated us gave us VIP treatment which was nice after a huge debocle at Rodney's Oyster Bar earlier in the evening. (More to come on that incident.)

My biggest complaint was the price. 18 bucks for a pizza is too much for the personal pizzas they are serving up. (Also, 14 bucks for 2 small lamb chops...meh.)

The best deal was the antipasto plate, which is loaded full of good stuff including: artichoke hearts, thinly sliced capicolla and proscuitto, pancetta with wild mushrooms and goat cheese, oven roasted buffalo garlic, Roma tomatoes, artesan bocconcini, oven roasted chorizo and lamb sausage with feta and an assortment of mixed olives.

My suggestion is to get the antipasto plate, some bread, enjoy the music and stay away from other items on the menu, they are simply not worth the price.

Food: not bad but not something to write home about. Entrees were all good but I honestly expected something better, especially angel hair pasta which fell flat on taste and portabello mushroom appie was just plain salty. Dessert of chocolate cake and ice cream was the only standout dish.

Service: Poor is all I could rate it. We were left in the doorway to stand while others were seated on the patio (despite being told by the hostess that the patio was closed down). Had trouble flagging our server down, waters were not refilled and it just goes on and on.

Value: Expensive for the small portions and accompanying small taste. Like I said above, the only item actually worth the money was the dessert.

Ambiance: Great ambiance with soft lighting and semi open kitchen. Great live jazz music playing and felt great to sit in. It was a little bit odd to sit in the corridor like area but the music did drift our way.

Overall, I would recommend people to avoid dining here at all costs as it would be quite disappointing. However, I would return for a drink if invited by others just to listen to the music and eat earlier elsewhere.

Went to Capone's on Saturday night for a birthday gathering after dinner for some dessert and drinks and check out the great jazz music. Had a party of 6+ and made reservations the day before through their online system. Was told at the door by the hostess that not all online reservations get received and they are still working on fixing this. Basically they lost our reservation. Waited around 15 minutes in order for the hostess to work out the reservations and try to find us a table somewhat close to the stage/bar.

We ordered drinks and I even ordered dessert, even though on the last visit I had bad experience with their dessert (frozen cheesecake, luke-warm chocolate lava cake). This time I ordered their creme brulee only to have it taste like the creme brulee that was bought at Costco pre-made. Can't even crack/break through the flambee top with my spoon, which is the epitome of a good creme brulee. My martini also came, with only half the glass full (did someone drink out of my glass at the bar before they gave it to me??). By the time one of our friends went to pay, the server told us we had to pay a minimum $20 order charge per person! This was not stated at the door when we were seated, not stated on the menu, not stated on the website, not stated when we were served throughout the night. We fought the charges, with the server then complaining to her front end manager about our table (not in private but at the bar in plain sight where we were sitting). She kept glancing over and giving us cold glares. My friend did not tip her and she complained more to her manager Josh, who came over to ask if we had a problem. My friends and Josh got into a confrontational disagreement, finally with one of us jumping in to smooth things over. The server then came back and slapped down our bill. Each time she came back towards our table it was more cold stares, no friendly smiles.

Following up to all this, I emailed the owner/chef of the restaurant and have not heard back since. My email by no means was all whining. I offered up constructive feedback and advice. If Capone's keeps acting the way it does without listening to customers, then good luck staying in business in such a competitive market!

If you like jazz and expect to eat the mediocre overpriced food and be treated horribly by their servers/manager, then check this place out! Otherwise, I'm sure there's a lot of other great restaurants in town.

ate here for dinner one evening before a canucks game and i was very disappointed that i chose this place especially with the wide variety of other restaurants in the same district.
i ordered this shrimp pizza which tasted good but for $20 and barely enough slices to fill the stomach, it was ridiculous. my gf ordered the calzone at the same price which was decent as well. the caesar salad that we also ordered came to $10 and it was just mediocre.
the service was fine, cant really comment on a restaurant and its service when the place was next to empty when we arrived so of course, you would expect good service or that would mean management is doing a horrible job running this place.
the bill totaled $90 including tip for pizza/calzone, salads, a beer and a glass of wine... im not cheap but that is insane for bar food that can be picked up cheaper and better anywhere else.
ambiance is average... dimly lit and they have a jazz band that comes in after 7 (i think because i didnt stay long enough to hear them play which would have been nice)
i highly doubt ill be returning to this place.. much too expensive for the type of food they offer. the only thing that i would come back for is the jazz band, to see what its all about and i guess then, i would have no choice but to eat here.

I was pretty surprised. Wasn't really expecting much, but I was pretty impressed with the place. Had great service, pretty decent food (we all got pasta), and of course great music. Hrm... I guess the only thing I didn't like was the seating, which was a bit cramped. But other than that it's good... i'd definitely go back.

Yaletown restaurants are always hit-or-miss. Some are real gems, some ride off their trendy reputation or hipster clientele, some are just horrible messes, like Capone's.

We went recently for a friend's birthday dinner, which had about 30 guests. I'd like to hear a reasonable explanation for the built-in gratuity for large parties at this sort of establishment. Isn't the job of a server to, um, SERVE? Large groups often have multiple servers anyway, so I don't see how big tables make an individual server's job that much more difficult. I find that the built-in gratuity has become a licence for servers to loaf and see how far they can push customers with their poor work. Capone's staff was a prime example.

Even with reservations, our group was seated at two tables. Not adjacent tables, but one at the front of the house and one in the middle-back area, with two other groups between us. Essentially, without any consultation or forewarning, Capone's staff split our group into two parties. During the 30 minute wait for the food, our group mingled. When the orders arrived, the pouty server made no real attempt to remember which dishes belonged to which seat (let alone guest) and lectured us for moving around and inconveniencing him.

We started with the beef carpaccio, which was advertised as "Seared beef tenderloin steak, cracked mustard aioli, warmed arrugula [sic] salad." (More menu errors were found later, which I take to be evidence of the owner and staff's lack of commitment to the place.) What constituted a "salad" was about 5 pieces of lukewarm wilted leaves, limply situated in the middle of a plate of sliced beef. My date and I shared the basil gnocchi and Godfather pizza. The texture of the gnocchi wasn't too bad, but the flavour was horrible. I have been known to enjoy eating whole heads of garlic in one sitting, but the sauce for this one was off-the-charts ridiculous; our dining companions agreed that it was "socially unacceptably garlicky," and nobody could taste the basil or any other ingredients. The pizza crust was overly thick and bland, and the toppings, marketed as "Andouille, capicolla, duck confit, chicken breast, mushroom ragout, veal jus," were an indistinguishable mess roughly piled onto the mattress of dough. Meanwhile, our friends suffered through giant scallops on a flavourless "braised short rib" sauce, a runny fettucini carbonara that scarcely had any pancetta (and certainly was not crispy as described in the menu), and slapped-together lasagna. One of us sent back his lasagna because it arrived cold. His plate was modified in the kitchen and sat under heat lamps - in our directly line of sight - for over 15 minutes before the server remembered to check on our table. At which point, the dish was cold again and had developed a crust. It was sent back once more, merely to be topped off with more sauce by the "chef" in the open kitchen, entirely visible to customers.

As we were finishing dinner, the couple across the isle was clearly in a spat. In an incoherent, profanity-laced tirade, the drunk man loudly berated his female companion. For some 20 minutes she was in tears, other customers stared, and our group stood up and shouted for the jerk to show some respect to the lady, yet not one person from the staff so much as bothered to try to calm down the situation. It wasn't until the sobbing woman dug up enough money to cover their bill and they were about to leave that the hostess made a half-hearted suggestion for the bartender to intervene, at which point he made a vague threat for the drunk guy to get out before the staff called the police.

The dessert menu featured a selection of "Mouse [sic] made truffles." (Perhaps not a typo after all.) We ordered the dark chocolate orange pot de crème, which arrived with the appearance of a crème brûlée, complete with a crackled sugar topping and not a trace of orange scent. Hidden under the garnish was a custard yellow base, so we asked the server to confirm that it was, in fact, the correct order. After visiting the kitchen, he returned with the same ramekin in hand, exasperated, and complained that the kitchen staff was "messing with his mind" because they had run out of the pot de crème and had decided to replace all the orders with a cappuccino crème brûlée without telling the waitstaff. No apologies, invitation to order another dessert, or even an offer to take the item off the bill until we asked. My date wanted an espresso was told that Capone's didn't have a cappuccino machine (Are we still in an Italian restaurant?! And where did those "cappuccino" crème brûlées come from?!) and that he could "Walk to any of the 8 Starbuckses nearby" if he really wanted one. (It would have been humorous to joke about the abundance of Starbuckses had the server done a competent job that night, but given the series of events, he just came across as being a flippant whiner unapologetically trying to skirt his duties.)

The bill came, not as one big tally for the whole table nor individual bills per customer, but with orders of random clusters of two or three people combined onto one bill. When asked to reprint the

What a disappointment for food, service, and drinks. Ambiance is delightful, service hit and miss, and just a notch above pub food. I know it is busy with the Jazz fest but a 45 minute wait for a salad was too much on a early Thursday evening. I love wine and their selection by the glass is uninteresting. My co-worker was not impressed with her warm martini (sat on the bar for a good 6 minutes). Go for the ambiance nothing else.

Capone's inYaletown is an awesome place to go and listen to jazz, have a couple drinks and eat some food. I really enjoyed myself.
We decided to share a few dishes between the 3 of us instead of ordering entrees. We ordered a Lamb Chop appetizer which was disappointing as it only came with 2 chops and was $14, an Antipasto platter which I highly recommend - it is piled high with yummy savory treats, and is a good deal at $19, and to finish we ordered a pizza, which was tasty, but a bit of a rip off at $19 (for a personal size).
I will go back for sure, but I will be a little more choosy about what I order.

We went for "music"session. We didn't make reservation. Not a problem, they gave us a good table, in front the bar. The waitress was a little bit lost, she tryed to be nice, but wasn't very professional. We had to ask for water more than once, our glasses always empties. She took very long with our drinks regardeless was wine. We had to ask for wecond bottle (she suppose to offer), but she was a "smiley person". The food was good. We didn't expect five star food but was better than the expectation. And then lets talk about the music. Very nice. Not to low not too loud, good selection and the players super profissionals. The only problem are the breaks. Toooo loooonnng. We thought they finished and almost asked our bill, when they came back after 45 min. toooo looonng. But was a great evening.