The toasted owl is a fun, quirky restaurant that should definitely be checked out! The restaurant has a lively atmosphere and attentive servers. If you do get a little claustrophobic or overwhelmed with noise, I would recommend coming a little later (it slowed down around 1:30pm on a sunday). The theme for the restaurant is owls, and they do not let you forget! Everything in the café is for sale, so if you fall in love with something on the wall just let your server know!
My party of 3 sat at the bar due to how busy it was, and we didn't feel forgotten by our server... which tends to happen when you sit at the bar at other places. She was extremely nice and our drinks and food were brought out promptly. I ordered a ruben with pastrami. The pastrami was delicious, it wasn't too salty or greasy. The ratio of saurkraut, dressing, cheese, pastrami, and bread was perfect and the sandwhich didn't feel heavy. The other people in my party ordered a BLAT and a BBQ Western Burger. They both loved their food as well and had absoloutly no complaints. The lunch entrees come with a side of fries and they were fantastic, I would come back just for their fries.
I would definitely check out this restaurant next time you are in flagstaff so that you can enjoy their unique vibe and great food!
Although we ended up having a great experience, I wanted to mention the horrible experience we had with the hostess. My party of 3 (women) walked in and were followed by a party of 5. The hostess made eye contact with us and then promptly ignored us 3 and turned automatically to the man in the party of 5 behind us and asked how many he had in his party in order to put them on the waitlist. He said 5 and even signaled who was in his party (not us). Even though it was a little rude of the hostess and a bit frustrating for her to just skip over us, we would have just ignored it and gotten over it.... except, the other woman at the desk realized what happened and in order to "make things right" she tried to put us on the waitlist. The hostess overheard her and rudely snapped at her, the poor woman then just apologized to us and said that the other girl was the hostess and could help us in a minute. The other woman reacted as if this was something that is a common occurance with this hostess. As soon as the hostess was done with putting the party of 5 on the list, she turned to us. I was the one who spoke with her and had her add us to the waitlist. She was still beyond rude, she was rolling her eyes persistently at me and had a not so friendly tone...it almost was like she had an extremely personal issue with my party? When I was giving her my phone number for the waitlist she had me repeat it about 10 times, I had pronounced the numbers extremely clearly, slowly, and loud enough to be heard each time. She added us to the waitlist and told us how long the wait was and then physically gave the hand signal to shoo us off. We stepped outside to wait for our table and were about to have the "what the heck just happened conversation" when in less than minute, a different staff member who was around the hostess desk when we checked in came out and asked if we would be okay with sitting at the bar. She was extremely nice and our experience went up from there.
I wanted to mention this because the hostess is the face of the restaurant, she is the first person that anyone interacts with when they walk in those doors and she sets the tone for their experience. If this is how she normally acts, which given the reaction of her coworker seems likely, then she shouldn't be a hostess at all. The only reason why we didn't leave was because one of our party members use to live in Flagstaff and had been here multiple times. Anyone who has never been to the Toasted Owl, probably would have left and missed this experience.
I had an extremely hard time deciding on how many stars to give this review, I am still giving The Toasted Owl Cafe a 5 star review because I don't think that the other staff members or any other part of my experience deserves any less... but if I were to rate only off of the first impression we got, which was the hostess. Then I would have rated it a 1 star with a "beware of this restaurant" review. read more