Heather Clarke

Review of Church Street Cafe

My parents were in town for the balloon fiesta wee...

My parents were in town for the balloon fiesta week and I had heard from a co-worker that this was a nice restaurant in Old Town Albuquerque so we decided to try it out. We entered and put our name on the list requesting to sit on the back patio, they told us it would be about a half hour wait and gave us a beeper telling us that we could look in the other shops on Church St and return when our beeper went off. We walked around the street for a half hour and then returned to the restaurant and asked if a table was ready. They told us that the patio was still not open but that we were next to be seated out there. We waited in the lobby area for about another 45 minutes, watching streams of new customers come in and be immediately seated. I continued to check in with the hostess who finally took us back to our table after we had waited nearly an hour and a half. Once we were seated outside we saw that other people who had come in after us had been seated on the patio before us.

It was another twenty minutes until out waitress came to get our drink order. We asked if we could get chips because we were so hungry from waiting so long and the waitress told us that she first had to take the orders for another party of 10 people before getting our drinks and chips. I finally walked up to a woman who I believe is the owner and told her what was going on after we had waited another twenty just for our water. She immediately helped us and apologized for the wait.

I would NEVER recommend going here unless you have about 3-4 hours to waste while waiting to be served. The food was good but the service was unbelievable. We were paying customers and felt as if we needed to serve ourselves the entire time.