Athens Cafe --30th Ave and 32nd St.

It’s our first cafe review! And it’s only April! This is monumentous. Typically when we start projects we don’t get beyond the talking points. But here we are, early spring with the entire summer spanning before us and already we have honey covered dessert and coffee swimming in our tummies.



Our first cafe is Athens Café. It came with the highest recommendations of a clearly insane woman, so we were excited. We arrived at 6:30 and immediately got a seat by the window inside – outdoor seating was rather crowded but it was too cold out there for us anyhow. The crowd was predominantly 20-something males, most of whom appeared to have been sitting at the cafe for the last 5 hours. The cafe was quite trendy – airy, open, lots of windows and the only option for at least a block (no other Greek cafes in sight). There was a huge bar with a light-up stone wall to set off the beautiful beautiful bottles of booze. They were showing poker on the huge HDTV. Booze and gambling -- need we even finish this review?



The menu was a huge 4 pages; we choose to focus on Greek desserts because we enjoy the challenge of pronouncing things like Galaktoboureko and Loukoumades. We went with “the L things” which turned out to be fried dough covered in honey – YUM! We originally thought $7 a high price to pay for fried dough but the order contained roughly 45 lbs of greasy goodness so our wallets really can’t complain (our thighs on the other hand…).


To wash down our sugar rush Brianna ordered a Cafe Freddo ($4), Amy ordered a $3 cup of American coffee because she found the Freddo not sweet enough despite the fact that the milky liquid has reached sugar concentration – the American coffee was plenty sweet once she stirred in 3 spoonfuls of sugar (makes the fried medicine go down!). Brianna is our resident Greek expert (she spent a whole week there AND works with a Greek lady!) and she felt the Cafe Freddo was very authentic – frothy, creamy and caffeinated. Amy was hoping the American coffee would redeem itself by being “refill-a-rific” (tm Joe), but our hot-but-absent waitress did not provide any fill-a-rific opportunities.

The facilities (aka the john) were nice, if a bit hard to find—there are no obvious signs, and you have to go down stairs that are not easy to spot among the throng of tables. Once there however, all the amenities are automated—something that will please our germ-a-phobic readers, assuming that we will attract readers with debilitating psychological disorders who also love greek coffee and fried foods (every blog needs a target demograph!).




Certain unnamed entities have insinuated that there is a lack of fun and interesting activities in Astoria. So as a rebuttal we give you blog-bonus material: Amazing Astoria Activities (alliteration is catchy). Because the options are so numerous, we have decided to limit our suggestions to those which can be seen from the window of the cafe-of-the-day (rhyming is catchy too).

Today’s Amazing Astoria Activities:
Does a Cafe Freddo contain any actual coffee? Hmm... perhaps we should ask our local psychic:










No. Nescafe.

Caffeine makes you jittery, sugar gives you cavities… Astoria can help:








Overall: (in place of numbers, imagine cute icons of appropriate Greek Gods)
(All on a scale of 1-5)
Food: 4
Service: 2.5
Ambiance: 4
Average attractiveness of staff: 4.5
Average attractiveness of patrons: 3.5*

* Note that patron attractiveness rating may be skewed upwards by the presence of Amy and Bri in the cafe.