Cleopatra's Cafe — Restaurant in Santa Fe

I've never thought I would say "Let's go to this place, I love their plain rice" until I had it from Cleopatra's. It's like each grain is perfectly coated in an oil film that keeps it from clumping, but light enough to still provide the perfect spread in your mouth.

In a time of scrimping and thrifting, the gyros are still stuffed to the point where it is actually kind of hard to eat them. There is so much meat in a gyro that you basically have to take it to your shamecorner to eat, since stuff's gonna be falling out all over your plate. It's pretty nice.

Eating in can sometimes be made more difficult by the really low lighting in the restaurant, to the point where you feel like you're eating in the dark and you have no idea where the gyro meat just went as you bit into it. I think they wanted the place to be lit by predominantly lit by natural light, but since they are kind of on the northwest corner less of it comes in. The open-roof plan and lack of noise-damping means you can really hear everything that anyone else in the restaurant is doing...

The food was terrible. The absolute worst Mediterranean food I've ever had. The food was NOT hot. The Egyptian moussaka did not taste fresh, and it was served warm. The spankopita was warm and had a strong oil flavor that overpowered the actual taste of spankopita. To make it worse, there was a strand of black hair on my plate, and my husband found a plastic butterfly bead in the tabbuoleh. The Greek salad was nothing special.. no taste. The falafel tastes like it was prefrozen and just heated up in a microwave. It was all a disappointment... the only thing that tasted decent was the fried potatoes and hummus. Also, the baba ghanoush from the King Tut plate was missing.

This place was a complete disappointment. Plus, the dining hall is dark. You feel like you can't see anything... it's just dreary. I will...

I like to get takeout here, and the food is delicious. But I don’t like the idea that the person working the counter makes $3 an hour. When I get takeout, all they do is take my order and hand me my bag. Which is the same thing they do at McDonalds. And McDonalds workers at least get paid a livable wage. It makes me rethink coming back and ordering takeout because I feel pressured to leave a tip to an underpaid employee, for doing a basic task. Even the chefs and dishwashers do more work, and I’m not tipping them for their service to make my food, am I? Seems silly to me. If you doubt me, look on indeed. Or lookup my post about how much cleopatra cafe pays the person working the register on reddit. r/santafe- cleopatra cafe...