Park Cafe — Restaurant in Winnipeg

Cold was the operative word . Understandably , with Covid-19 , the reduced capacity does not make the restaurant look as professional as before, but sitting in the back area, we felt we were back in high school in an industrial cafeteria. Very cold and boring ... And it was cold , the A/C on and the window open beside us ... I didn't bring a badly needed jacket or parka. We asked to move , but the waitress's response , I assume bias, as we would probably have to move out of her section, offered a small sunspot over by the emergency exit even further away from any fellow humans and even more institutional. This opening 15 minutes set the tone for the meal to come, I ordered the pancakes and some bacon. My friend ordered the Park breakfast.. The park breakfast was nothing special from other restaurant offerings. He ordered over hard , which it was still a little runny , rye toast, which was obviously last week's bread order (dry) , and sausage, which was a very dry piece of Winkler farmer's sausage... great for bbq or family pot luck, but nothing like a sausage link expected from 99 % of any other restaurant I have ever been to . As for the pancakes, nice flavor, but the waitress, forgot the butter and syrup , and had to go back , and in the cold, by the time I tried to melt the butter , which didn't, and pour the syrup, I basically had three discs of buttered cold toast . The only nice flavor was to steal the blueberry jelly from my friend's breakfast, and 'jazz' them up . Btw, the jelly was nice, but maybe offer the option of standard breakfast spreads for those that might not like sweet berry toast , especially two grown men. Needless to say, his breakfast, not as expected nor as ordered, was not appreciated or worthy of the special breakfast experience in the Park.. so to backtrack to the initial entrance, we were asked if we wanted a sunny window seat or not, we decided the morning glare might be too bright... And made our second mistake of the morning. We were given the dungeon area.. We paid our bill, left a tip, and as we were leaving , not a word from the two staff at the maitre'd desk ... no thank you for coming. Have a nice day. Enjoy the rest of your morning. Enjoy the park. Notta. Nothing. And with masks , obviously, we will never know if they even smiled... Which leads to our first mistake that morning, going to the Park Cafe for our summer holiday breakfast... Very disappointed... basic nothing experience and the atmosphere that one would expect being in the middle of beautiful park in summer. Was very COLD... like a winter day in a staff cafeteria at a local industrial plant ... our usual A&W breakfast in a sunny window seat was soul missed and much better food ... no...

This is the most overpriced and disappointing park cafe experience I've ever had. We were not allowed to order takeout from inside the dining room, we had to go outside to the window. The takeout menu at the window was a tiny fraction of their eat-in menu, basically restricted to drinks, fries, poutine, chicken wrap, and chicken fingers with fries. 12 oz fountain drink was $4.25, and comes in a plastic cup but with a paper straw that lasted 10 mins before it started falling apart. Why they can't do a 20 oz paper cup with a plastic straw is beyond me, and would result in much less plastic waste.

Forks were also cardboard and I had to ask for one with my fries, it was not automatically provided. The fries were $5.99 for less than half a clamshell full (see pics) and they were all tiny pieces less than 2 inches long that basically required a fork to eat. I declined ordering the chicken fingers because they wanted $14 for three small fingers. Bottled water was $4.50 for 591ml and normal 10 oz black coffee was $3.95.

This is a great place to feel special about buying overpriced, small portion cafe food and saving the environment with paper straws, while not actually saving the environment at all, and leaving hungry with an empty wallet.

Ridiculous. A simple hot dog cart with normal prices would put this place out of business in a matter of days. They rely on the fact that you're captured in the park and it's a ten minute drive offsite to the next closest restaurant. Would not recommend this cafe to anyone, you're much better off driving offsite or bringing your own food when you come...

My friend and I had a 3 pm lunch today. Yes they close at 4pm no problem we wanted a quick lunch. we were told that the patio was closing and the staff was leaving so they would not seat us outside, no problem. we ordered lunch it came in 5 minutes ( so i’m sure the meal was microwaved nothing cooks that quickly) I asked how the vegetarian burger was, our server a tall man, said it’s good, well it was awful, dry and the bun was dry but probably the best part, I didn’t eat it as it was so dry it was hard to get it down. I ate the salad, my friend had fruit with chia seeds which was good. When i explained to the waiter that the burger was really dry and I couldn’t eat it he said sorry ( literally I didn’t eat much). When the bill came I didn’t get any sort of discount off the $17 price, even a sincere apology would have been something. we paid and when i looked at the time it was 3:40 wow 40 minutes to have coffee eat and pay in less that 40 minutes! I will not be back, I have owned restaurants and this is not how you do business! Oh and the bathrooms smelled of 💩 and had paper towels all...