Cups Cafe — Restaurant in Palm Desert

The alliteration brought me here. The cool vibe, decent enough food & nice service kept me there.

ITEM'S ORDERED:

Chilaquiles Shrimp Frittata Blood Mary

TASTE:

Both dishes tasted fine enough, but I do think they could have used more flavor overall.

I did not notice (until now) the Chilaquiles comes with either red or green sauce. They just gave me red sauce & I think getting both sauces would have made the dish much better. I'm a big fan of queso fresco & the salt flavor it brings so I enjoyed how they gave a good amount of it. The portion was quite large & with the over hard egg on top of it all, the dish stayed quite hot. The chips were thicker & able to hold up in the dish. I'd actually get this again but would need a well made salsa to go with it.

The Shrimp Frittata is definitely one of the nicer brunch dishes I've seen. It's not the usual frittata & basicallyround shaped scrambled eggs on top of potatoes. The shrimp were decent sized & seemed fresh. The dish looks really flavorful as it sits in the red chipotle tomato sauce, but I do think it could use more seasoning, since tasted too "light" in the chipotle aspect & more heavy in just tomato.

Overall both dishes for me could have been improved with some more aggressively flavored sauces. Something to bring more savory & heat. But thats for my palate, I could see many people enjoying these as is.

The Bloody Mary was alright. I've had better but also worse for sure. It was strong in the alcohol aspect which I of course enjoyed. I do like my Bloody Mary more spicy so I added some extra Tabasco & black pepper. It could have used some horseradish as well.

SERVICE:

They were very busy on a Sunday afternoon on Labor Day weekend. I think me & the gf had to wait maybe 30 min for a table. As soon as I pulled up I saw many parties waiting for tables. The host was very kind & our server was fine as well.

I did notice that if you didn't mind sitting outside you could get a table right away, just FYI. But no way I wanted to eat in 110 degree weather even if there was shade.

Also, I'm pretty sure this place does not take reservations, but I could be wrong.

LOCATION & PARKING

The interior is very "cute" with the mirrors on the wall, cup clock & other design elements. There's a fair amount of tables inside, more than you'd think from looking at the place from outside. & there's maybe even more tables available outside.

They are located off Country Club drive in a plaza with lots of available parking.

I liked the design of the place & I'd like to try something else out here so I'm open to coming...

Well I sought this place out after looking thru Yelp and Google for a nice place for breakfast as I'm not from this area. The Yelp and Google reviews seemed promising so we gave it a try, not once but twice. Both times were early in the day for breakfast. The first time the service was really good. The food wasn't exceptional, I actually didn't like the first dish I ordered and the server took the plate back and brought me something else that was much more enjoyable. Kudos to that server.

The next trip was several weeks later, right after the restaurant opened for business. My wife and I both ordered some coffee drinks and breakfast. My steak and eggs was good, cooked to the right temp, eggs and potatoes were basic and acceptable. My wife's dish was their specialty of the day which was pork with green sauce over eggs. The sauce was flavorful but the meat itself was cold. Not cooling off after being served but literally still cold after not being heated to temp. My wife didn't eat her breakfast but picked off of my dish. What seemed like a manager came to our table to ask how our meal was and I explained to him that my wife's food was cold. He then said if we had mentioned this sooner, he would have been able to do something about it. Really? The food was literally cold so my wife didn't eat but one bite of the meat and had to pick around at the egg underneath.

I really don't like giving bad reviews about locally owned businesses but this response from the staff on what could have been easily resolved left me left me wanting to warn others. I gave this restaurant two chances and unfortunately they won't be...

Ok people here we go. Cups is trying hard to be something great and it’s very popular on the weekend for brunch. The first flaw is there is more seating than the kitchen can handle so once you are seated the wait times for food are very long.

When our food arrived my wife’s breakfast had a hair right on top. Okay we’ll get a remake. They brought the food back and had clearly scraped the top layer off and added new eggs to the top with a soggy underneath. With half of the contaminated food still there we both lost our appetites after waiting 45 minutes for our food. Not to mention the steak was overcooked and both our dishes where missing onion and avocado which we could see on the same dish all around us.

Our server never did offer us refills on our empty drinks during our 45 minute wait.

Great job on crafting the menu and food presentation but restaurant operations and management are the foundation and Cups is...