The Osborne Village Café

Disclaimer: do not go here if you want exceptional service. It’s just the way it works, very relaxed but nice servers. They take your order and sometimes forget to bring things but it adds to the charm. No eye rolling on their part. The reason I give it 4.5 stars? The food.
The Breakfast Burger is a fav. Quinoa and avocado option is one the best breakfast items I’ve ever had. The Veg is also exceptional. If you’re feeling frisky, try the Elvis; peanut butter, bacon, banana sandwich. Wow. Regular coffee is surprisingly awful consistently but the tea choices are very good. Wait times can be long on weekends, no reservations. Closing the Osborne location so we’ll see how the new spot works out.

diner meets hipster.
delicious food.
decent prices.
friendly service.
laid back atmosphere.
fabulous green vinyl.
(i had the beet letkes. so, so good.)

The food is just so incredible. Prepared with love and pride. From the soup to the ketchup, everything is wonderful Haven’t had a bad meal there. Fun and inventive menu. The only bad part is the service. Seriously, get it together front-​end staff! The food deserves better. This place should be packed all the time, but I’m kind of glad it isn’t.

This unassuming place serves amazing and unique breakfasts. I ordered the hipster omelette which had mushrooms, chickpeas and sauce and was really good. My sister ordered The Elvis which is peanut butter and bacon sandwich which was a delicious sweet salty taste. The prices were great and we thoroughly enjoyed our breakfast!

Being a 4-​star diner we had some expectations; two of them being good food and good service. It failed on both.
The café is nestled inside the motel. We walk from the lobby and and see a few people waiting in front of us. One couple leaves and a group is seated. We were seated not even a minute after arriving. The diner seemed like it was stuck in the 70’s, but in a very good way. It brought me back to earlier times. It was quite busy. I guess this is the place to be in Winnipeg?
The server came to take our food and drink order. After ordering our food and drinks I asked if it would be a good idea to order my dessert now. She responded with a resounding, «oh YES». My wife ordered tea and I got a black coffee (drip coffee is all the have). The drinks took awhile to arrive. I got cream on the side even though I ordered black. And after an even longer wait our food finally arrived. I ordered the curry omelette with hash browns. About the third of fourth bite the hash browns started to taste bland (not sure why). I had to load up the dish with lots of salt and pepper in order to eat the rest of it. The curry as well, after a few bites got a bit bland. It was quite possibly the most bland curry dishes I’ve ever eaten. It seemed like it was just curry powder and water mixed together.
My dish was supposed to come with toast but it never arrived. I asked twice for it and they had forgotten about it. I was never given any ketchup even after they touted how good it was (homemade). The server who screwed up didn’t even come to apologize herself, she got another server to do it for her «she feels bad» is what she said. OK, I get it… but that still doesn’t fix anything. My meal was already finished by the time they realized the ketchup was missing. Then, they tell me that they ran out of the dessert I ordered, even though I had ordered it at the beginning about hour ago?! If it was sold out back then wouldn’t they have said something? They obviously forgot to put the order in at the beginning.
I finally got my toast though, I had to eat it on its own with a side of blueberry jam. I guess the jam was pretty tasty. I guess that became my dessert.
Because of the sub-​par food, sub-​par service it would take a lot for me to go back to the Osborne Village Café.

Went for brunch and enjoyed my Mansion Sandwich very much! It’s a cool little unique hipster place, that has the Osborne vibes. Food presentation isn’t the best, but the food itself is pretty good! Good portions and fair prices. My sandwich was $ 9 with no sides, but it was pretty big and was very tasty. I will be going back for more in the near future for sure!

So glad we discovered this place (thanks Unilocalers). Went for breakfast on a Sunday morning around 9am. As soon as you walk in you see the micro greens growing which is pretty cool. Didn’t have to wait for a table. Everything was fresh and delicious especially enjoyed the hash-​browns. We now want to return for lunch and dinner and of course breakfast again.

We went hear a couple times (visiting Winnipeg) and the food has been good on both occasions. Order the home made iced tea (way better than the canned kind). I had the «Curried chickpea» which was delicious (think masala chickpea curry). It comes with the option of quinoa or Manitoba wild rice. I opted for the wild rice and was very happy I did. This was nothing like traditional white rices and was very well cooked. We also ordered the breakfast salad and perogies here. The breakfast salad had spinach, feta cheese, dried banana chips, and a grapefruit vinaigrette. This was an interesting mix of ingredients but the sauce was sweeter than anticipated. The perogies were freshly made and served with sour cream and sauteed onions. These were larger than the frozen perogies from the grocery store and tasted great.

A Wednesday morning at 10am. 11 tables of customers and one waitress. I had to ask twice for my tea. Food was ok. Sausage toast and eggs were good but the hash browns were crazy garlicky.

Great poutine! A little disappointed that they only had Duck Fingers… and not Chicken Fingers. I know im a boring eater but I was really craving CFs :(I would say 3.5

This is one of those places thats makes me wish I could vote 4.5 or 4.75. The food seems to all be made on site, they source mostly from local farms, and grow their own micro greens. The service is good, and I have enjoyed almost every thing I have ate here, really like the hipster for breakfast, and this has become one of my two fav places to go for breakfast these days.
Yes I have gone back yes I will go back again.

This restaurant has myriad shortcomings but its virtues far outweigh its flaws. When my wife and I arrived we nearly tucked tail and left immediately. The inn Osborne Village Café is stationed in has seen better days. The smell of cigarettes still lingers and the mustiness is formidable. The décor and general ambiance of the restaurant do not at all suggest the creative menu our acquaintance praised but instead brought to mind the very greasiest of spoons, the modus operandi of many, but not your correspondent. Thank the gods we took a glance at the menu before we ghost, because this café has the inventiveness and vitality of a high end localvore *destination*.
It was impossible to choose what to eat. No doubt if we hailed from Winnipeg we would return regularly to explore further. Forced to make the tough decision, I sided with cholesterol and ordered the pulled pork omelette, replete with a corn salsa and sweet bbq sauce. The hash browns: unbelievable; the omelette: made with quality eggs that come out glowing that deep yellow created by a proper poultry diet, flavourful and complex, with a pulled pork of ideal consistency and sweetness; the portion: bountiful. Perfect hangover medicine.
My wife chose from the opposite end of the spectrum and was no less delighted. She ordered the Winnipegosis Salad, a much less guilt ridden dish. The outfit: leafy greens, wild rice, carrots, roasted corn, and parsnip with a dressing of celery root and garlic, topped with three strips of pickerel. It was a creative meeting of fresh flavours with savoury stewed vegetables fit for any grandma.
No doubt the biggest surprise, and I save this for last, is that Osborne Village Café can craft such fine dishes with such pricy ingredients in a kitchen blaring metal music at you as you walk through the door, and nevertheless charge dive diner prices. Both of our dishes, if I remember correctly, were under ten dollars!
This café is one of the best kept secrets in Canada. Don’t sleep, and don’t be scared away by the roughness around this café’s well worn edges – it all adds to the charm.

This place looks like a dive on the inside, but since the food is so unbelievably amazing and cheap, I ain’t even mad. I ordered the turkey club sandwich, and it blew my effing mind. HOORAY FOR REAL TURKEY ON A TURKEY CLUB SANDWICH! Waaaay too many places use that fake turkey lunch-​meat crap, but not The Orborne Village Café — all real, all day. I happened to go on Canada Day, so it was crazy busy, and there was only one server and one busser for all those tables. (Maybe another server called in sick and left those poor girls high and dry?) So, needless to say, I’m sure it was a difficult job for the staff that day. But still, they should have acted a bit more professionally. They were completely frantic, and even borderline-​rude. It really did take away from what was otherwise an amazing experience. I’ll definitely return here next time I’m in town, and if the service is any better, there will surely be an upgrade in my review from amazing four-​star to perfect five-​star.

Love this place. I’m almost hesitant to write a review, because so far, we’ve never had to wait to get a table. It’s only a matter of time before that changes. Good coffee, local ingredients, and even though the menu is not huge, it has a nice variety of breakfast, lunch and dinner options. On my last visit I had the Elvis (grilled banana, bacon and peanut butter sandwich) and hash browns, and my wife had the beet and dill latkes. Both were great. My wife is reading this as I type, and now it looks like we’re heading there for dinner! Anyway, great little place, tasty food, friendly service and relaxed atmosphere. Highly recommended.

Relaxed atmosphere and delicious home grown eats! So ok, lets get this out of the way– you aren’t going to dig this place if you’re not into a slightly dive-​y vibe. It’s clean but it is part of a bar/​motel, so you might run into some characters on the way in.
The wait staff are all super rad and friendly, and the food has a nice range from traditional diner breakfast to Beat and Pea Shoot salad. The great thing is that everything hovers around the same proportions and price points– so you wont feel ripped off if you go the healthy route.
I’ve tried almost everything on the menu at this point and I’ve always been impressed with the outcome.
The selection of herbal teas is really nice, I like the «nourishment tea.» They are from Hollow Reed (a local hippy shop) so you can be sure that you’re getting a cup of the good stuff.

The Café, as I’m going to start calling it, is a hipster paradise. The food is around 10 $ and generously portioned. You can tell that a lot of love goes into its preparation because it has achieved something rarely found in breakfast places: food that tastes like breakfast made at home. I pitch this compliment as follows: who has time to make a good old fashioned breakfast in their home? I rarely do. Secondly, if it tastes homemade they are not using eggs from a carton (they are local in fact) and the bread is good as well. Potatoes are local as well.
Before you get the wrong impression and think this is only a breakfast place, let me set you on the straight and narrow: they serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They have a weekly soup and a weekly pie (which I think is a great idea). I don’t remember all the menu items but they included things such as an omelette called «the hipster» and a club sandwich called «the mansion». I am told that many of the condiments are made in-​house, and with the love that exudes from every plaid shirted server and customer I don’t doubt it for a moment.
We ordered:
–French Toast
–Beet and Potato latkes
–The Hipster
–Curried Chickpea and Wild Rice Burger
–The Squash
— Jagermeister Ice Cream
Of the two, the latkes were better, in fact they were fabulous. I really don’t like latkes and I could have eaten these until the cows come home. The server was wonderful and even swapped out bacon for fruit salad, which had great cantaloupe despite going in mid-​winter (this is an older review from my blog).
I have also ordered the Hipster, which is definitely worth trying. I also noticed that there is a very good vegetarian selection, but nothing for the vegan crowd.
We were blown away with their dinner items. If you think their food is good for breakfast, dinner will impress you even more. Both main dishes we ordered were wonderful and the Jagermeister ice cream was fabulous. The veggie burger is one of the best in the city.
The first time I went there I was anxious for a moment when I walked in the door. After that first visit I would not hesitate to invite anyone I know for breakfast or dinner there. What more can you ask for?