After three years in Champaign I finally went to Minneci's because I got a restaurant.com coupon - $100 off if you spend at least $200 total. Four of the six people in my party were first timers. We all heard mixed reviews and I was starting to get dubious because of some bad reviews on Yelp.
I don't know why people are so down on the place. The only bad thing was zero parking at 6pm on a Friday night. It seems pretty popular. There were some families with younger kids, but mostly it was adults (we were all 25-30 yr olds). We got to try a lot of stuff because of our coupon - we ordered 3 bottles of wine, 4 appetizers, six entrees and two kinds of dessert. Not a huge wine list, but all the wine we ordered was pretty good.
The meals are neither cheap nor expensive for a sit down Italian restaurant. There are $30+ veal dishes, but most pasta/chicken dishes are $13-$17 and they give you huge portions of pasta. I can say for certain that four of the six of us really loved our meals and I'm pretty sure the other two liked theirs fine. Entrees come with soup or salad and garlic bread. The garlic bread was mediocre, but my clam chowder was good. The mozzarella sticks, eggplant and meatball appetizers were all good, but the shrimp scampi (really overpriced at $9) was only so-so. The spumone gellato and irish cream bash desserts were both amazing.
Waitstaff were friendly, professional and attentive, even on a busy night.