Cafe Crepe, 1032 Robson Street, Vancouver

I’m out in Vancouver this week at the DevTeach conference and we’re getting out to eat at a lot of restaurants.  This morning Justice, Shane, Kyle CodeBetter-Kyle (url to be determined) and I went out for breakfast before coming to the Steven Rockarts road show.  Kyle had it in his head that he wanted to go out for crepes so off we went to a place he’d seen on Robson Street.  We’d made a failed attempt at breakfast yesterday at this place only to find that it didn’t open until 8am and we were foiled by our ability to rise early while attending a conference.

So we wandered down to Cafe Crepe and grabbed a table pretty much right at opening time.  Within seconds of getting the table we had our waitress greet us and menus in hand.  Kyle (also known as the freezing ex-Canadian) and I got our hot-chocky pretty promptly and the waitress took our order.  Shane, Kyle and Justice each had a crepe and I ordered both a crepe and an omelette based on the waitress’ suggestion that a crepe might not be filling enough.

Once our order had been placed we waited no less than 40 minutes for our food to arrive.  Not once in that time did the waitress come by the table to see if there was anything she could get for us.  No water, no refill on the hot-chocky, and certainly no update on the progress in the kitchen. 

Let it be known that the kitchen was not in the weeds at this point in time.  There were only about 8 other people in the restaurant and a very slow amount of traffic at the street side take-away window.  Most of the tables arrived after us and I think that every one of them had their meals before us.

After our forty minutes of conversation our meals finally showed up and any hope of saving the day disappeared.  First thing that I noticed was that the plates were placed on the table and no mention of drink refills was made.  The next thing was that I had specified no toast with my omelette, but whole grain toast came.  After the wait we had endured, I was very eager to eat (I suspect that all of us were) so I dove into the omelette straight away.  About half way through it I noticed that there was an unbearable and overpowering taste of salt.  If I had been in the kitchen I’m sure I would have seen the cook (I will *not* call him a chef) knock a container of salt into the eggs.  The taste was so strong that I could not eat any more of it, which made me quite thankful that I had ordered the crepe.

Slightly concerned about the food quality, I still soldiered on and started on the strawberry crepe.  The crepe itself was nothing special.  It has what appeared to be fresh strawberries and nice colouring on the outside.  I worked my way through most of the crepe before trying any of the whipped cream.  I probably should have stayed with the crepe as the whipped cream was very close to being runny. 

After eating it only took about ten minutes for me to start feeling like something wasn’t going to stay settled in my stomach.  I’m not sure what caused it, but Justice suggested that he had the same feeling and the only thing was similar between our dishes was the whipped cream.

It’s been an hour since we left Cafe Crepe and I’m still feeling the effects of an unsettled stomach.

In my mind there are three crucial components to creating a good restaurant experience; Food, Service and Ambiance.  Our experience shows that Cafe Crepe doesn’t have either the food or the service to qualify as a good restaurant.  Because so much of ambiance relies on the mood that the staff sets, service is unquestionably linked to ambiance.

If I use those criteria to critique Cafe Crepe I would say that they are a 0.5 out of 5.  I give them half a point simply because they were able to open on time.