Mister McGoo’s

I love you. I will miss your excellent spaghetti, salad and bread (snif snif :() You are a wonderful good olé fashion Italian restaurant and a true Petaluma icon. I really hope you’re able to find a new location. We have lost so many really good, excellent even, restaurants over the years and I was hoping you would not be one of them. Please try really hard to reopen. The old Green Mill perhaps???

A MUST GO TO RESTAURANT! This place is 100% family owned, not many other places are anymore. It’s been here forever and the food is amazing! BEST pasta I’ve ever had! Love this place, and will always be a customer

Really bad, according to my grandparents it used to be really great. Chicken was bland, raviolis were undercooked and had mushy bland beef mixture inside of it. Minestrone soup tasted like it had been frozen, then reheated. All the vegetables in it were soft and mushy. Don’t go!

Awful… do not bother to even think about eating there! Everything is «way» over cooked and tasteless. Avoid!

It was Sunday, and it was slow. But the owner, Tony was happy to see us and we had amazing service. This place is classic, family style italian. Red checkered table cloths, family photos on the wall and huge portions.
We had the chicken parmigiana and prime rib. Both meals came with soup, hot buttery garlic bread, salad, veggies and a side. Go with the polenta! Creamy and delicious. We both loved our meals, the prime rib was tender and cooked perfectly. The chicken seemed to be breaded and deep fried, and soooo juicy. I came very close to cleaning my plate.
Bottom line: italian comfort food. You’ll feel right at home.

Still reeling from 3 cooks closing my friends and I (on my suggestion) tried Mister McGoos for Sun Brunch. We should have thought twice and ran far far away. I remember the food from before Jr and HS dances (way too many year to admit) was good food. The brunch is served buffet style. French toast and pancakes are as good as any 6 dollar buffet but nothing to write home about and certainly not worth paying 14 and change for the breakfast buffet. Stay far away from the «eggs» which I think were powered. The eggs Benedict had a weird bread like thing that didnt make sense and the hollandaise sauce tasted like it came from a knor package where you add water.
The «sea“food quiche is made with puff pastry out of a package, crab with a K, shrimp with an sch. It was SO gross! Next on the plate was their fried chicken. How can you mess up fried chicken? By not frying the chicken at a high enough temperature to make the coating crispy, thats how! there were bits of unfired topping on bottom of the chicken which was wet and disgusting. The apple dumpling was a freezer croissant filled with apple pie filling.
I have to say the beef stew and polenta was pretty good but nothing on the brunch menu was worth paying 14.00 for. Next time, well there wont be a next… next time we will just skip and find somewhere else to eat.
My dinning companion had fruit that was perfectly prepared but everything else seemed like it came out of a can of something you would find in the basement of a food warehouse or other wholesale grocery store from the 1970s.

Mister McGoo’s…is a warm and friendly place. I have been going there since I was 16 years old. The family is wonderful and we are friends. If you want good food, great service please go there. If you haven’t tried their Sunday Brunch… that is a must.

Let me start with this: don’t expect great service here.
That being said, the Sunday brunch was excellent!
I was truly surprised by all of the delicious options. The eggs benedict were awesome, the polenta was the best I’ve ever had, the potato dishes were perfect and the sausage was amazing. There was also a good selection of breakfast foods and other dishes that I didn’t try.
Plus unlimited champagne! They refill often, and though the glasses are small, I was still able to get six glasses.
I highly recommend the Sunday brunch. It’s $ 14.50 per person, but well worth it. Also, the restaurant looks a lot nicer on the inside than it does on the outside.

It is with a heavy heart that I give this restaurant a measly one star. One of the oldest establishments in Petaluma, and the food tastes like it has been around just as long as the building.
My first experience at McGoo’s was for dinner awhile back. The menu was unimpressive. I struggled to find anything at all I wanted to order. Settled on calamari steak with polenta. I was excited to try the polenta, but was sadly disappointed. It tasted like nothing but cheese and not in a good way. My dining companion ordered a steak dinner and was not impressed either.
Decided to give McGoo’s another chance after receiving a gift certificate. Took a chance on the Sunday Champagne Brunch Buffet. Mistake. The food was barely edible. Worst french toast and pancakes I have ever laid eyes on. I have seen free breakfast buffets at hotels that were better than the spread at McGoo’s. I will say that there was a wide selection of food to choose from, but choosing between one tasteless entrée and another is hardly worthy of an additional star. The champagne was decent enough. Add the orange juice and you can make yourself a tasty mimosa.
The only saving grace for this place is the service. Our waitress was attentive, friendly and thoughtful. The rest of the staff made sure to greet us upon arrival and bid us farewell. Still does not make up for the lackluster menu and food.
I love to eat local, but it is safe to say that I will never ever eat here again.

This is THE BEST place for a breakfast buffet. THE ABSOLUTE BEST! There is a ton of variety and bottomless champagne. Yeah, it’s not fancy. I also think it would be nice if they had a couple more healthier options aside from fruit. Don’t come here if you are dieting!

Generous portions, and a very friendly atmosphere… food is good, not great, but it’s the kind of old fashioned dive that has a history!

Came here for sunday brunch. Just recently heard about it. I’m planning on becoming a regular and thats a lot to say because I don’t live in Petaluma.
Eggs bennies, corn beef hash, ham, bacon, sausage, cake, chocolate pudding, grits, lots of potatoes, french toast, pancakes and blintz. And a bunch of other stuff I have forgotten. I believe there was fried chicken.
I have forgotten because there is bottomless Champagne. Yep thats right bottomless. And they use old school champagne glasses so it makes it even cooler. Perfect place for girls night in the morning. Ok so its not the greatest quality champagne but really after like 5 who cares right? And the servers are NO joke. They are refilling you glasses everytime you blink.
Bring a DD. You will need one.

Have you ever thrown a pot-​luck or maybe had a few too many and spent the night at the pot-​luck thrower’s house unexpectedly? Well then you know how amazing it is to wake up and realize that there is an entire fridge filled with all the awesomeness of yesterday’s party. That’s kind of what McGoo’s Sunday Brunch is all about. All of your best hangover staples laid out on oilcloth covered tables in sweet nostalgic McGoo’s. Are you getting fois gras here? No. Will you find any garnish of frisee or sprigs of anything carefully adorning your plates? Hell no. That isn’t what this brunch is about and shame on you for hoping so. This is about carbs and fried chicken for breakfast. Yes, you read that right. The schmanciest they get is the eggs benedict where they place the egg on puff pastry instead of an english muffin… and it works, people. It works. The service is friendly. If you have lived in town for any portion of your life, you’re going to see at least three people you know. No one looks at you funny when you return to your table with round three of deviled eggs, corned beef hash and chocolate pudding (you will judge yourself later, I promise you this). Sure, stew and polenta may not be your thing on a Sunday morning, but just have a glass of champagne and calm down. You don’t need Michelin stars at every meal.

I typically love this kind of back to the fifties place. Usually good food makes up for the lack of ambience, but we didn’get either. The pasta sauce was blah, the prime rib while large in portion was small in flavor. The garlic bread was great. Poor food quality and poor ambience, never again.

I found their food to be only average and over priced. The atmosphere was very outdated and it was not conducive to a pleasant dinner. We had our grandchildren, three and six, with us and the restaurant was a good place to take kids. They had a couple of electronic games and we were not concerned about noise or making a little mess.

My grandmother, a long-​time Petaluma resident, had her birthday dinner here last night. It was very… Petaluma. It does remind me a bit of a church basement. There is a full bar, a fairly large dining area, and a separate banquet room. There are a couple of arcade games, a jukebox, and some obscenities carved on the ceiling of the men’s bathroom.
The food is not good and the prices are too high. The entrees ‘include’ soup, salad, garlic bread and either pasta or ravioli. In other words, they make you pay $ 17 or $ 18 bucks if you’re going to be eating there. You could get a plate of just ravioli, spaghetti, or chicken caesar salad, but the price and the quality make it a terrible value.
The salad is from a bag, the soup is from a can, and the ravioli is from the freezer section. The meat sauce on the ravioli is boring. The garlic bread is definitely not homemade. The salad dressings are from bottles (or maybe a big plastic bag).
For these prices, you could go to a different place and have a much better meal. However, the place does have that nice down-​home neighborhood feeling. It’s been around for about 45 years, and it was cool to see all the pictures of the family who owns it pasted on the walls. Part of me feels bad about writing this review, but it is the truth.

I have been going here since I was a kid. When someone in my family had a birthday this is where we would go. The same family still runs it but the next generation has taken over. You will still find the same menu and recipes as in the 70’s. This is a full meal so plan ahead and take ¾ths of it home. This place is THE seedy dive of restaurants in Petaluma but the food is great and the bar serves up strong cheap drinks. Don’t miss the painting in the dining room of the building you are in with the little house on top set in a moonscape with a flying saucer.

Went here with some friends/​co-​workers for a dinner out. At first glacé the price’s are a bit high but then you see what comes with it. Soup, Salad, Garlic Bread (unlimited huge bread) and your meal. If you order a steak it comes with a side of pasta of your choice. Large portions, cute atmosphere but not a 5 star taste. Very great service! Maybe I would go again with friends but not on my own. Could be I just had something not the tastiest. The steak did look good but I stuck with raviolis.

Came here last night for drinks and dinner with some friends… evidently this place has been around since 1965… the food it primarily Italian, but it has the usual steak and prime rib dishes as well… decent food, kind of on the expensive side and it was very «local» in feel… over all it was pretty good.

A tragedy. My heart wants to give this place more stars than it deserves. Open since 1969, it’s an old favorite fallen on hard times. The interior is divided between the bar, small but serviceable, and the dining room, which is rather like a church basement in the very most nostalgic kind of way.
The menu is priced on the high side, and is limited in the tradition of the old Italian-​American Dinner places of the past. Steak, seafood, pasta, chicken parmigiana, veal scaloppini… nothing fancy. ALAS, the food is all about cut corners and an obvious lack of pride on the part of the kitchen staff, and I was deeply disappointed.
The portions are huge, but the quality is dreadful — the result of cheap, food service ingredients and a cook who should take a sabbatical. I was going to try out the homemade bread pudding for dessert, but could not bear the thought after the salty, baby-​carrot-​laden monstrosity that is Bob’s Special Stew with Polenta. (The polenta was actually good — creamy and infused with rosemary — which gives me hope for them.)
I’m worried about this place; I am SO sorry I can’t recommend it. I don’t see this place surviving much longer without getting some quality back. It needs an intervention.