Avenue Café – 30th Ave and 36th St

The waitstaff at Avenue Café has uniforms that match the awning -- this sounds awful now that we’ve written it down, but it’s actually rather cute. Not as cute as retro "Mel’s Diner" inspired dresses would be, but since Avenue café doesn’t even serve grits (and thus threatening customers with grit-kissing would be pointless) the matching t-shirts are good enough. As far as we can tell the hostess is free to dress as she wishes. If we owned Avenue Café we would impose a company-wide “no lace leggings” rule in order to rein in her Lindsey Lohan inspired fashion choices.

Brianna (who, as you may remember, holds the title of resident Greek expert due to spending 10 whole days in the motherland last summer) does not recall a plethora of light-up walls from her travels, but they certainly are popular here in Astoria. Avenue’s offering is less offensive than most… but it’s still a (huge) light up wall. MTV2 was playing on the flat-screen but the club music spewing forth very, very loudly from the millions of wall-mounted speakers was from some other source. Our hatred of lace leggings plus these complaints about the loud devil music might be the evidence that we are approaching 30 at a much too speedy clip.

We ordered frappes ($3.75) and the small mezze sampler. The sampler consisted of fried cheese, pita, grilled chicken, cucumber, tomato, olives and two items we had never heard of (Lautza and Loukanico) which the nice waitress informed us were smoked pork (turned out to be basically fried ham…) and some type of sausage. The frappes seemed to have a heavier coffee flavor than most-- which Amy liked and Brianna didn’t (odd since Amy is usually the more wimpy coffee drinker). We had mixed feelings about the food: The sausage, the cheese and especially the ham and cheese rolls stacked on cucumber and tomato slices: YUM! The chicken (dry), the fried ham (fried ham?) and the olives (how can olives lack flavor?): blah. We decided to top of our evening (and thighs) with a nutella crepe with vanilla ice cream (~$6) which was wonderfully delicious (but really how do you ruin nutella crepes?).










Service was a little spotty— we had finished our water and frappes and even after we asked for more water it took quite a long while to appear. However, the waitress was very nice, and even came back to correct her first explanation of what Loukanico was. The patronage was mainly young and attractive—possibly the club-going types that would enjoy the music that was giving Amy a headache and making Brianna reminisce about why she doesn’t like dance clubs. There was one women wearing an inexplicable top…it was like a tank top with a very wide cowel neck sown over the top… but otherwise everyone was much hipper than us.

Awesome Astoria Activities:

Anyone up for billiards? Snooker?












Food: 3.5
Service: 3
Patron Attractiveness: 4
Wait Staff Attractiveness: 4.5
Ambiance: 3.5