Porch Cafe — Restaurant in Galveston

The food at Porch Cafe is awesome but the service is not worth the visit.

We arrived later in the lunch hour and another group of 8 was already being served. We were largely ignored by the waitress as it took over 10 minutes before she took drink orders. Also detracting was getting my own drink refills and having to ask the only other visible staff if our order was being tended to as approximately 20 minutes had gone by without receiving an order of starter parmesan french fries.

Our lunches eventually came out (french toast, chicken / waffles, 2 salads) and as mentioned the quality excellent. However, with the restaurant mostly empty, having to wait 40 minutes for such is excessive.

In watching the table next to us, there was a great deal of confusion on the server's part as to who ordered what and food not ordered by them was brought out.

Finally our server brought the check, placed it on the table, and walked off.

Upon entering Porch Cafe, the person seating us talked up the key lime pie and said how great it was. I went to the bar and requested from one of the cooks a piece of the pie. Our server then brought the pie out and gave it to the other table! They were very jubilant and confused as they had not ordered the key lime and furthermore one piece to split between 8 people?

I returned to the bar with payment to the same person I gave the key lime order to and said I was done. The cook did notice the mistake, apologized, and said the pie would be right out.

The server brought the pie and said it was "on the house." The fact I did not pay for the key lime piece is the only reason I did not protest the $14 charge for the parmesan fries.

The whole experience was such a shame as Porch Cafe has...

My rating system: 1=worst. 3=average. 5*=best.

Environment: 4*. It was one of the nicer looking cafe style restaurants on the island. Maybe even the nicest. Solid silverware. Heavy white chairs. Nice "porch" for outside dining too. Good location. Wasn't too loud or too quite.

Staff: 4*. Very friendly. No complaints here. I didn't really "test" their knowledge of anything, so I can't comment about that. The sweet potato chips our waiter recommended were good.

Food: 4*. The food itself was good. Ingredients appeared fresh and the presentation was great. I got the burger with blue cheese and sweet potato chips. Burger was a tad dry, but overall better than average. The chips were made in house and were very good. We also got the coconut shrimp, which were also above average.

Value: 1*. This was the huge drawback for the Porch Cafe. The coconut ship was $10 and it only came with 3 shrimp. No small sides or anything were included. It was smaller than most appetizers at other restaurants. The burger was $18. As stated above, it was a good burger. However, I was expecting more for $18. They could have gotten a star back from me in this column, if they had complementary bread prior to the entree. Just something extra to offset the small entree portions.

Overall: 3. I won't be going back here because of the poor value. I usually don't mind paying more for quality food, but $10 for 3 fried shrimp (without including tax and tip) is just silly. I normally give 2 and below for places I don't plan on revisiting. This is an exception because I think they did everything aside from value so well. It is a shame. We ended up having to go to a fast food joint after because we were still hungry. We are by no means...

This place is a bit funny and adorable, or at least that's the experience we had on a random Thursday night. We made reservations but a few hours before time, one of the staff called us apologizing that they only had their happy hour menu available for the night. That was still ok with us since we were just walking over from the Galvestonian, so we headed over. When we got there, there were more apologies because there wasn't a bartender, just one waitress, and, from the looks of it, just one chef (at this point I was expecting epic fail and to have a waste of a night). I wasn't too surprised about what looked like short staffing on their part since it wasn't a weekend and it's a tourist beach city, and so with expectations low we sat down. Both the menu and the wine list looked great with the food leaning towards southern comfort seafood, so I ordered some fried green tomatoes and Bloody Mary ceviche, while my wife got the crab cakes. Despite there being no bartender, the waitress let us know she'd do her best to make whatever cocktail we asked for, but we decided to spare her and get some wine (Petite Syrah - I'm a funny guy where I drink red wine with fish and stouts in the summer). When the food and wine finally landed, it was just great! It could be that my expectations were so low that it would have been hard to disappoint so we went for another round with a new wine and it was still really good. I'd be curious how the place does when properly staffed, but they turned out solid food with solid service for us with a skeleton staff. When we finished the meal with another glass of wine and a delightful lemon blueberry cake, the epic fail I had expected really turned around to a...