136 Yorkville Ave., Toronto
T: 416-515-0587

It pains me to give Babalúu a thumbs down. I used to really love this place. The food, drinks, music and atmosphere were fantastic. However, all of that changed as of fall 2013.

A friend and I visited Babalúu for dinner and dancing one Friday night a couple months ago. We had reservations and were seated almost immediately...in the middle of the room…on the dance floor (as in, once people started the dancing lessons they were bumping into our table). Alright, no problem, they were really full and it was already 8pm. We ordered our food and a bottle of wine. Our appetizers came quite quickly. We got our favourite starters which are the Babalúu dip and the empanadas. It was delicious but I was shocked to find that I only got one empanada. That’s right. One lonely empanada sitting on a plate was placed on front of me as my appetizer. 45 minutes later, we’re still waiting for our entrées. There was a couple seated two tables away from us who ordered their food at the same time. The server brought out their meals (they ordered the same things that we did, steak and paella). The dude cut into his steak, took a bite, decided it wasn’t cooked as requested and then called the server over to his table. Not two minutes later that exact same steak lands on our table. Disgusting. My paella is delicious but I can’t enjoy it because my poor friend is trying not to throw up all over her secondhand slab of meat. The server finally comes over and asks if everything is ok and my friend asks to speak with a manager. Manager comes over, listens to her complaint and then he politely says “and what would you like me to do about it?” WHAT? I’m sorry, did I just hear your correctly? Are you actually a manager here? I am getting high blood pressure just sitting here writing this review. He gave us 3 glasses of wine on the house (3 glasses of wine for 2 people, makes sense right?). We were charged for our bottle of wine and our meals, that includes the steak. It is awful that standards have clearly dropped here and it appears as though we aren’t the only ones who had a bad experience, see review on Toronto.com http://www.torontolife.com/guides/restaurants/latin_american/babaluu/