Butterfly Fly Away: Butterfly Garden Cafe
My work does this lovely thing where my department gets together once in awhile for a nice little lunch. I adore the ladies I work with, so we all look forward to this little outting and take turns choosing the place. This month we visited the Butterfly Garden Cafe on Bardstown Road, and we got, frankly, a mixed bag.
The place is super adorable, first of all. There’s the whole wall of vintage looking rings (for $20 each) and other cute, girly stuff like teapots and bracelets. The staff seemed friendly, and even though we had to wait for like 20 minutes for a table, we didn’t mind so much. The Butterfly Garden Cafe is only open during lunch hours, so I could see how it might be a bit crowded at the peak time. There was a great deal of older women in plush jogging suits there, with meticulously done nails—ladies that lunch, women who are lucky enough to have either snagged a job that allows them a day off in the middle of the week, or married a dude who can allow for a one income home. JEALOUS.
When we were finally seated, we ordered almost immediately and commenced a long wait. Between us, we ordered a good sampling of the whole menu—cool pink strawberry soup, a tuna melt, a chicken salad sandwich, a warm ham and brie sandwich, a turkey breast sandwich, a harvest salad, and an autumn salad. The standouts of the day were the strawberry soup (silky and cold, like a creamier smoothie) the warm ham and brie (brie is the food of the gods) and the harvest salad (goat cheese, pine nuts, craisins, spring greens and added chicken).
It took us, I kid you not, a full hour to get our food. Mind you, we had ordered several sandwiches and a few salads and a cup of soup—absolutely NOTHING difficult to prepare or long term. It doesn’t take an hour to toast a tuna melt. It does not take an hour to pile some pine nuts on a heap of spring green and craisins and roll it out with some dressing on the side. It shouldn’t take fifteen minutes for us to get our drinks, or a refill of our drinks.
Not only this, but the tuna on the tuna melt was unpleasantly strong and fishy (if Tuna is too fishy smelling one usually assumes it is too old to serve) and the vanilla cupcake we got, while it did have good frosting, had obviously been sitting on a counter for awhile. See how the sprinkles had bled into the white of the icing? That’s a sign of a super old cupcake.
I am not a lady that lunches. I have a full time job and I work my tail off, as do all the women I work with. We didn’t deserve to have our time wasted like that, and neither does anyone who has to get back to work at a decent hour. The Butterfly Garden Cafe has delicious food, but it is a prime example of how service needs to be the first priority of any place catering to people who are on a deadline.
