A short ride away from Capital University, Easy Street Café has opened on Main Street. I took two of my friends to see what this new restaurant was all about.
We took a car to avoid a twenty minute walk down Main Street in a recent bout of cold weather that had hit campus.
When we arrived at the restaurant, we were surprised to find almost every spot in the parking lot full, except one. Luckily, we got the last spot and were able to head inside.
As we looked for the entrance, we spotted a group of cheerful women finishing up a discussion they assuredly started inside, which was beneficial because they pointed us to where we needed to go. The entrance was hidden in between parking spots and probably would have been hard to find by ourselves on the first try.
I was shocked to find that the main door of the restaurant led straight to the bathrooms. Not only that, but the tile covered floors housed two life-size models of what appeared to be the blues brothers, which seemed to have no relation to anything else in the restaurant. To the right of these seemingly random statues was what looked to be a food storage area.
Once we passed through the first room, we had to make our way down the narrow space between the bar, which seemed to be the restaurants dominate feature, and the wall. This led to the whole of the restaurant, which didn’t have much seating and was surprisingly tiny.
The waitress behind the bar told us that we had our choice of seating before following us to a high table and giving us menus while taking our drink orders.
From what I could tell, she was the only waitress there, with a total of three employees. The other two employees spent the majority of their time preparing the food in a small kitchen at the end of the bar.
The rest of the cafe consisted of mainly seating, with around five other assorted tables and booths in the restaurant, all of which were filled. Beyond that, the bar itself was really the only other option as far as seating was concerned. Which, through the course of the lunchtime rush, also become almost filled.
There were a variety of different kinds of people at the restaurant. There were old couples, young children, a trio of college students, a group of housewives, and a few businessmen all eating at the same time; and yet, it didn’t seem out of place.
The restaurant’s menu had a wide selection of typical bar foods for reasonable prices.
The food, which was a good portion for the cost, came out quickly. I ordered the Greek sausage gyro and got it in under fifteen minutes. My friends, on the other hand, received their grilled cheese and fish and chips about five minutes after I had already gotten my meal.
In my opinion, the gyro was just okay. The vegetables seemed fresh and were the best part of the dish. The seasoning and cheese weren’t overpowering, but the sausage itself wasn’t much to my liking. Overall, it just seemed too tough and made it unnecessarily hard to get through the dish, especially since this could have been easily rectified by slicing the sausage up into smaller pieces. The side of fries that the gyro came with were expectantly bland, but some salt helped them along (though they were a tad greasy).
The general consensus from my group seemed to be that the food was good enough, and that the meals made a nice change from the typical school food that we eat. If we had to go to a place and spend some extra money to get food, the Easy Street Café probably wouldn’t be the first place we’d choose.
