The Olympic Café is known for its lively bar scene. It is a classic meat market type bar with an abundance of beer. They serve cheap fish tacos one night a week as a means of drawing in people looking for a party when none other is to be found on the quiet island of Kauai. Olympic Café also operates as a restaurant and several years back, I used to enjoy frequenting it for breakfast. Although I had never had a high quality lunch or dinner at the Olympic Café; I remembered the breakfasts having been decent. We decided to head out one Sunday morning to see if the breakfasts at Olympic Café were still good.
I always look for the positives in any experience; so I will start off with them here. The portions are huge; and the boothes, being perched on an open air second floor balcony overlooking downtown Kapaa are a nice place to people watch. The ambience has the potential to be quite nice if it were not for the constant blaring of television from the bar and the intermittently loud traffic noise from the street below. That’s about all the positives I can honestly share.
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The quality of the food is atrocious. My five year old daughter, who adores bacon, was very excited for her bacon sandwich. When it arrived; she proceeded to pick the entire sandwich apart tasting every individual item and spitting each one back out before settling on a “meal” of slices of pineapple and a side of GMO papaya. Yes, five year olds can be picky, but not this particular one when she is really hungry and looking forward to eating one of her favorite dishes; the food simply did not meet her quality standards; and it didn’t meet mine either.
My wife and I had similar experiences with our omelets. They were large, but barely palatable and we both felt quite nauseous half way through our meal. The service was below mediocre; our waitress was more interested in chatting at the bar with her friend who was bartending than in taking our order, bringing our food (which came out cold), refilling my iced tea or providing us with our $40 check. I admit that it is one of my pet peeves to wait for my check; but 10 minutes plus after finishing our plates we were still asking other servers to get our waitress to bring us the bill and that is simply unacceptable; especially in a more than ½ empty restaurant.
There is a saying about standing in a cold shower burning $50 bills and that’s how I felt when we walked out of the Olympic Café; except I was also bloated, nauseous and not at all as refreshed as I would have been had I taken a cold shower.
