Y'all...I'm sorry. I've sat on this review for a while now, wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt and support a family-owned, local restaurant. But at this point, I feel obligated to alert the Dallas dining public that Oloyo has been having ongoing issues with their air conditioning system. And it's...bad. And...they're not giving ANYONE a heads-up. And...they're acting like it "just happened."
It's been about a month since I had dinner here with some friends. Their AC was completely non-functional that evening. In a tiny space with an open kitchen and sunlight pouring in through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, the entire place was basically an oven. We sweated through our clothes and were digging through our purses trying to find hair ties to pull our hair back. Bizarrely, the staff didn't even acknowledge the issue until we talked about it, at which point we were told it had just happened. None of our meal was comped, and honestly it just made things worse that the only gesture of "hey thanks for staying and dining with us anyway" was that they brought out some glasses and poured literally 2-4 sips of the bottom of a flat bottle of pet nat into each of our glasses. Yikes.
The reason I'm posting this now is that another friend of mine (whom I hadn't warned) ate dinner there this week and ALSO said that there was NO AC. I don't know if this is bad luck and it just happened to break again, or if it hasn't been functional for the past month, but either way, yikes. Yikes for the experience of sweating through an insanely expensive dinner. Yikes for the restaurant not closing until they can get this fixed. Yikes for the restaurant not even giving diners a heads-up. Like, hey, you might not want to shower before dining with us, because you will need a full shower after. Yikes, yikes, yikes.
AC issues aside, the food is tasty and creative, but nothing left a lingering impression or memory. It would be a GREAT meal at a much lower price point, but at the absolutely astronomical prices they've set (fair warning: if you plan to brave the AC issues, also check the menu prices in advance), the food should be outstanding. It's not quite there.
There were other issues, too. For example, we had a somewhat early reservation (around 6 pm), and they were already out of ingredients for multiple cocktails. Things like this I can excuse as bumps in the road getting a new restaurant up and running. What was harder to excuse was the fact that we waited literally 30 minutes past our reservation time for our table to open up, and there is NOWHERE to sit or even stand while waiting, so we awkwardly lined up along the wall in one corner and constantly had to step out of the way of servers. Standing awkwardly for half an hour past our reservation, dripping sweat, watching the people sitting at our table lingering over their dessert and making us wait -- not because we were trying to make them feel bad by watching them, but the restaurant is SO small that we were practically standing over them -- well, it wasn't a great start to the meal. Nor was the fact that we were told we'd have a drink "on the house" that I guess ended up being the aforementioned splitting of the quantity of a single glass of flat pet nat across our four glasses.
I'm really pained to have to write such a devastating review of a local restaurant, but after hearing that the AC issues are ongoing a month after our visit, I just couldn't NOT say something. Again, maybe our visit a month ago and my friend's visit this week were the ONLY two days that their AC wasn't working, but...idk. At any rate, the restaurant seemingly isn't giving anyone a heads-up if their AC isn't working on the night of your reservation, so y'all deserve to know that this is a possibility, and at the very least I'd suggest calling in advance to ask. read more