Restaurante Café Vinilo — Restaurant in Valparaíso

I am an American visiting Valparaiso for a physics conference at the University. I am staying down on Papudo street but had heard about the restaurants further up on the hill so came up to try one out. I spent 45 minutes wandering the neighborhood trying to find the right place but was not impressed until I found this place. I find other reviews complaining about the price ironic as most of the restaurants up here were pricier with menus that didn't impress me. I decided on the Vinilo based on both the ambience and the menu and it was the right choice. The Pisco Sour I ordered took a while to arrive but it was sublime. I had a beef dish with a kind of cheesy polenta with just the right amount of heat. The beef melted in my mouth. The red wine (Cabernet) that I had with the beef was a perfect match. After the entree I ordered a desert -- don't remember the name, but it was some kind of tart. Apparently it was the last piece and so was extra large. It was simply delicious. I could have had a cheaper and quicker meal down in the city, but why? I won't say that this is best restaurant up on the hill because I haven't tried all the others and I won't say that m,y meal was "perfect", but I had a meal that I will remember and if I come back to Valparaiso -- hopefully with my wife -- I will bring her back here first. Kudo's to the owners and chef for a cafe that stands out...

This café translates the vibe of Valparaiso. The food was what we were looking for. We haven’t heard about it before and it was recommended by the hotel where we were staying at. It was a Sunday night, and no many options to choose from, so we decided to give it a go, with absolute no expectations. All the dishes we had, felt like homemade and very authentic. The Machas a la permesiana (Chilean pink clams) were my favourite. Used to eat clams, I haven’t tried anything like this before. We also had empanadas and the pastel de choclo (one of the typical Chilean dishes), which was recommended by Daniel, the nice and very welcoming waiter, after we told him that we would like to try something from Chile. This cafe claims to be the first pisco sour bar in chile where the pisco that we had was sooooo good, that just before we left Valparaiso, with no more space for food in our bellies, we went back to it to have one last pisco. We have been to other restaurants in Valpo after that, but this is the one i will be recommending to family and friends when visiting the beautiful place. I Also would like to highlight the great service from all of the team, but specially from Daniel, which was extremely friendly and gave us a list of places that we should visit, which we religiously followed. Oh and the music is just what you would like to listen when eating....

The food, drinks and venue were all really nice but the service was inexcusably bad. One of the staff told me this was because they were short staffed due to it being a Sunday, which is a very easy problem to fix.

When we were eventually able to get a hold of the waiter when he told us that lots of items on the menu were unavailable. We then ordered something that he didn't say was unavailable, only to be told a few minutes later that it also wasn't available. We ended up ordering 3 starters to share because they seemed to be the only things we could order. Only 2 of the starters came out, and the third (which was to be cooked in the clay oven we could see from our table on the terrace) never entered said oven, so we cancelled it. The bill then had a mistake where the item we initially ordered but were told was unavailable was on our bill.

Only one of our 2 pisco sours arrived at first, 15 minutes after ordering, the second after another 15. Our water never arrived.

We wanted to order more drinks or food because it was all delicious, but the service was so slow and bad / forgetful, so we thought otherwise.

I would recommend going if you can somehow check in advance that they're going to have enough staff working. Definitely...