Food Review: The Oakwood Cafe

The Oakwood Cafe

660 Osborne St

 

The location of the Oakwood cafe is just a little bit unusual. Sandwiched between a Subway and a Pizza take-out place in a strip mall sounds like the location for a barbershop or a tanning salon rather than the 10^th best restaurant in the Osborne-Corydon cluster (at the time of writing). Or maybe it isn’t unusual at all. The Oakwood is nestled close to the (somewhat) new and very exciting group of restaurants near The Park Theater in south Osborne.

They describe themselves as “a family friendly restaurant” with “some funky twists on a few dishes”.  These words can sometimes be code for “the food is boring and cheap because children don’t like to try new things and parents are very often impoverished” and “one of our dishes contains hot sauce in the lowest dose possible.” In the case of the Oakwood cafe it is not code for anything, it is truth.

My wife and I rarely look at the menu before we go to a place so we weren’t really sure what “vegetarian” meant in this context. Sometimes it means 1 salad that doesn’t contain chicken and there is a plate of hash browns which can be upgraded to beefy hash browns for an extra 2.99. Sometimes it means there are so many veggie options my little heart weeps with joy. In this case it is somewhere in-between. We went for dinner and found there was good number of dishes that we could eat (3 sandwiches, 8 burgers (by virtue of swapping in a veggie burger for any of the burger options), 2 pastas, 3 salads, 1 entree, and a few sides). I got a bit carried away on that list...

Anyway, we ordered:

Mediterranean Pasta

This came with:

Garlic Bread

Borscht (which isn’t vegetarian, but we pretended)

Vegetarian Wrap

This came with:

Sweet Potato Fries (upgraded for 1.99)

It came to about $42 with a 15% tip. In retrospect our server probably deserved more than that, he was amazingly friendly and helpful and very sociable. Some of the best service we have received anywhere.

The borscht came before the rest of the food. The soup is so perfect that I wouldn’t bat an eye if someone told me my grandma was in the kitchen shredding the beets. But what really won my heart was the sweet potato fries. Good heavens they were good. They changed my feelings about all the yam and sweet potato fries that came before and will be measure for all yam fries that come after. They were hot, they were crisp on the outside, they were soft on the inside. The chipotle aioli was tasty and not too brash. Oh my goodness, go eat their sweet potato fries now!! The vegetables tasted fresh and were cooked perfectly. The artichokes were particularly good. The wrap had goat cheese in it, which was amazing. The people at the table next to us were praising the liver and onions, so you might want to try it too. My only regret was not ordering a milkshake.

The verdict? If you find yourself there make sure to have the fries, they are worth every penny you spend. If you don’t have a borsht-making grandmother to keep your soup stomach full, you should probably order that too. I might recommend going for lunch over dinner because of the large number of sandwich and veggie burger options. 

Until next time,