The Leaning Maple — Restaurant in Olympia

On Monday afternoon we visited for the first time and unfortunately we will never be back. After seeing fan rave reviews from the local community I told my husband it was on our list of places to try and he surprised me after our trip to the book store. Our baby just turned 8m and as a postpartum mom I haven’t been out for a sit down meal yet. It was just overall disappointing and sad.

Our server started out as friendly but very clearly gave off the “I can’t wait to leave vibes.”To be honest I wish he would have just turned us away or handed us to the other server from the start. There were other tables still eating and ordering so we didn’t realize we had come at the end of the day where they would actively be doing their closing tasks around us. We didn’t speak to him again after he took our order.

We thought you know what that’s relatable we’ve been there and just thought it would still be okay. Another server brought us our food and then she later brought out our missing side. No one checked on us the entire time after that. Which would have been super helpful since they brought us the wrong sandwich and salad. My husband went to the other server to let her know about the mistake.

Apparently they mixed up our tab with another table…which the other table was charged for on accident. Since the kitchen was closed we were also left without the correct order.

I appreciate the server who fixed our tab and apologized for our experience professionally and kindly…as she was also at the end of her day and didn’t even start with us. Maybe if we had her I wouldn’t be writing this review.

We ordered the peach pie waffle and the turkey pesto sandwich with the arugula salad.

The peach pie waffle was just okay; the waffle texture is great and tastes good, but the peach pie filling was not what I was expecting for such an expensive plate…straight cheap out of the can sugary goo, with a spoonful of teeny tiny chopped nuts on top. The ice cream scoop was the most exciting and decent tasting thing on this plate.

We were given the turkey cranberry sandwich and the kale salad. The sandwich was boring, barely any normal deli meat, no additional seasonings/dressing/sauce, the arugula was tasty and fresh at least. The kale salad was gross and I like and eat kale at home all the time. It was like the bagged kale salad at the grocery store but without the goody bag of seeds and berries and barely had any dressing.

When I go out to eat where I’m expected to spend over $20 per plate I want it to spark joy in my brain. I want my tastebuds to be so happy I didn’t just cook myself a meal instead because they made it better than I could. This experience was a let down and made me feel like they are trying to cut food costs at the loss of anything homemade or flavorful.

The bathroom was also dirty, full of flys, and almost out of a tiny roll of paper not even attached to the dispenser.

Pros: the space is huge and live piano is...

I loved going here to eat brunch with friends and for end-of-quarter gatherings. Unfortunately this establishment has decided to go all-in on their use of AI.

Olympia is a town full of artists and creatives, why would The Leaning Maple need to use a plagiarism machine to spice up trivia night? Who asked for this?

I would like to correct the record on a few points the owner made in defense of their decision:

"You were probably notified about the trivia either by Facebook (Which uses an Ai algorithm)..." Facebook's algorithm is a reinforcement learning policy generated from user interactions, combined with deep learning. Generative AI, such as AI videos, use a large transformer model that has been weighted through the consumption of copyrighted works, often used without consent or permission. The two are not the same. Facebook isn't stealing from artists by recommending trivia night to people. (Facebook is stealing from artists with their Meta AI project though, which is why they're currently in a class action lawsuit)

"...or an email that has been segmented and distributed with Ai tech as well." This is not accurate, email uses the same protocols for distribution and segmentation that were written way back in the 70s, it's a backwards compatible and federated system. You might use generative AI in your own inbox, through services like Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot, but most people who use email prefer not to.

"Do you know you are posting this review from a phone or computer that is riddled with Ai apps?" Nope, I'm on Linux. This is Olympia, a lot of us do things a bit differently here. I think it's part of our charm, but it does make baseless assumptions about others more difficult.

The food is delicious, the staff is friendly, the live piano music is delightful; I look forward to a time when this drama is behind us, but for the time being I can no longer count myself...

First off, the food was pretty good and definitely dedicated gluten free, so a good spot for people celiac to grab brunch.

But I give it one star because we received possibly the worst service I've ever experienced at a restaurant when we went. I'm going to just list out the things that made this such a strange and bad experience.

Our waiter never introduced themselves or brought over waters or menus for about 20 minutes, and only after I went to the host to ask what was going on. They also only gave us three menus for our party of eight.

For eight people, we were fit on a table barely big enough for 6. The grabbed an extra chair from another table, but still we only had seven. I had to grab the eighth myself.

Our waiter didn't know what the soup of the day was, and there was no drink/coffee menu printed so you had to get up and walk to the menu board to read the coffee options, and then order from your table. Very unusual. (Plus according to our waitress they don't have a stove (???) so ordering a poached egg is the only option, which is just super strange to me and I can't wrap my head around how you poach an egg without a stove.)

After ordering, we were offered menus and waters and asked if we had ordered by three different waiters, each of which we had to inform that we had already ordered.

When the food was served, the soup was barely warm (It was not a cold soup, to be clear) so it was clear that it had been sitting out for some time at non food-safe temps.

All of this together made for a frustrating and confusing experience. I'd also like to say that they weren't terribly busy when we went. I know this place is new but this seems like really basic service stuff that they need to figure out to make it worth returning in the future. At this point I can't recommend it to anyone who isn't eating there because of...