Paradise Park Cafe — Restaurant in Oakland

Was surprised to find Paradise Park Cafe open today as I walked around the neighborhood. The cafe took over the Actual Cafe location around January 2017. Took a while to open. Today was their official grand opening.

I had an almond milk mocha with an almond croissant, $9.19 total including a $1 tip. I guess that is what a coffee drink and pastry costs now. They do NOT have a senior citizen discount and no opening specials. The drink and pastry were okay, the mocha was as I asked for, not sweet, but lacked a strong chocolate flavor. The almond croissant had little flavor.

Even though they had around 10 people on their staff, the opening day showed that there was a lot of management and training to do. Some things I noticed:

No dish pan available, unclear where dirty dishes go

The instructions from the counter person about how to get on the wifi were incorrect, there was no hub called ParadiseParkCafe. The password I was given did not work for the two hubs, Paradise1 and Paradise2.

_ Some good stuff

toilets clean and functional.

staff friendly and courteous.

lots of seating with indoor and outdoor options, individual tales that could be pushed together for a group.

large number of food choices and drinks on menu -- mostly "healthy"

There was no bulletin board for a cafe that advertises as a community organization. Also, most of the patrons were visually and hearing plugged into their electronics -- again not much community.

Unclear where to wait for coffee drink or...

I love this place, it's super convenient and right around the corner from my house. The only reason I don't give it a full 5 stars is because sometimes the staff are rude. I remember on two separate occasions. I understand, I work in customer service and sometimes we just have a bad day, but I think it's important to push through it or remove yourself from the floor if you aren't going to be greeting customers in a friendly way. Food service is slow a majority of the time, takes like 20 mins for a sandwich to come out which is another disappointment. I notice this isn't the first time the speed of service has been criticized. It's rarely busy also so it is a bit uncomfortable that it takes as long as it does to get food or drinks.

There could be more seats near outlets, or if they could install some more that would be great as a majority of the people go there to work on their laptops and whatnot.

Also another area for improvement could be the kids play area. I have nearly broken an ankle trying to walk over the toys that are left out all over the floor, not just designated in the play area but literally in the walk way. Maybe making sure customers with kids clean up after themselves. That could cause...

This place was so disappointing. I was happy to see that they had so many vegan options, but a closer look at their menu and most things marked vegan are not vegan. This menu needs to be updated so that vegan items are marked properly. This place has a lot of potential to be vegan friendly but fails in many ways. The chickpea tofu is a weird, grainy, flavorless slab, I don't know why they don't just use regular tofu or chickpeas for those items. They have homemade cashew cheese sauce which was good, but not on many items. It's like they want to have vegan options but then just don't know how to execute them. Tried the vegan bahn mi and vegan breakfast burrito both were strange in flavor and lacking flavor at the same time. The avocado "toast"-it was just on bread, not toast.

I appreciate the quick response from the owner, and may come back to try in the future. But the fact remains that an item with both meat and cheese was labeled vegan, the chilequiles with tots, this was one of many items that have animal products but are labeled vegan. Additionally nearly no humans are carnivores the word you are looking for...