Galaxy Café -- 30th and 37th

Two posts in one week! Surprise! Out of guilt for going so long without a post and in anticipation of being huge slackers we went to TWO cafes last Tuesday night. After dinner at Grand Café (which has a new ridiculously large advertisement at the Ditmars’ subway station) we walked the 50 feet over to Galaxy Café for dessert. 30^th Avenue in the mid 30s is so flush with cafés that we could have continued this pattern until we collapsed from over consumption. It’s possible that even 2 café’s in one evening was a bit too much for us, by the time we reached Galaxy we had to talk ourselves http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.photo.gif
Add Imageinto wanting dessert.

Galaxy is tiny and much cozier than most of the other Astoria cafes. There were no crazy lit up bars or walls or unifying themes. The décor kind of reminded us of a (generic) grandmother’s house—a cozy couch, wallpaper of questionable taste and dim (but not dark), non-overhead lighting (though there were some recessed track lights in the ceiling). The most impressive decorative touch at Galaxy is the cool vintage cigarette machine located near the bathrooms – it even sold cigarette varieties that seem to have fallen out of regular circulation – it’s almost too bad we don’t smoke. There seemed to be some kind of back seating area as well, but at least on Tuesday evening, most of the customers were located either outside or in the front section of the café.

It doesn’t seem like Galaxy has a kitchen so we assumed that the food options were of the honey soaked variety only however on her trip to the bathroom Brianna noticed that someone was getting some French fries – but it seems likely that these were ordered from outside for employees only, we certainly did not notice a menu.

We are big fans of local recommendations especially when faced with unfamiliar pastry options (though it could obviously be argued that five months in to this challenge we should be Greek dessert experts) so we asked the waitress at Galaxy to recommend a dessert. The waitress was surprisingly unwilling to help us with our decision claiming that she can’t recommend anything because she doesn’t know what we like. We felt a bit snubbed by this and started suspecting that the waitress didn’t really like us. They had a sizable variety of the typical Greek and non-Greek desserts we’ve seen in our travels, including cheesecake, chocolate moose cake, those little cakes shaped like mice, and unknown things wrapped in pretty foil. We eventually settled on the philo dough, honey, walnuts and cinnamon connection. Though very pretty, the pastry was incredibly stale, so much so that we couldn’t get past more then a few bites.

As we go to the dessert-focused cafes, we have noticed a repetition of desserts, and are beginning to suspect that they are not—gasp—made on location. This asks the question: where are these delectable looking concoctions concocted? Is one of the cafés supplying the others? Do the Greek desserts and the non Greek desserts come from separate sources? Is the supplier outside of Astoria?? Another mystery….

When we went up to the counter to pay our bill the total came to $3.75 and Amy paid with four dollar bills – this is when the waitress’ dislike for us became most obvious – and got back 5 nickles. NICKLES. In a city that lives on quarters! If you see Amy on the street and she seems rather stinky you’ll know that she was unable to do her laundry due to the cruelty of the waitress at Galaxy.

Patron Attractiveness: 2.5

Staff Attractiveness: 2.5

Food: 1.5

Atmosphere: 3

Service 2.5