Voilà Café or is it Café Voilà? (East Grand Rapids, Michigan)

Sometimes price and size matter. We've eaten at Voila 3 times in the past 8 days. I think they've only been open for about 2 weeks, so if nothing else we're clearly supporting a new restaurant.

Why on earth would you eat at the same place 3 times in 8 days you might ask? Well, that's easy: picnic, breakfast, dinner.

Cafe Voila is owned or managed (or something) by the family that brought us all Arnie's bakery and restaurant (a Grand Rapids tradition that at this point seems to be poised to suffer the same fate as Bill Knapp's: When your clientele is all over 80, your restaurant isn't long for this world). With a small, but attractive interior, the restaurant seems destined to rely on take-out and out-door dining (they have tables in the plaza adjacent to the East).

Picnic
They do take-out, we do take-out, and Voila is within walking distance of both our house and the venerable John Collins Park on Reeds Lake in East Grand Rapids. Voila provides big meal-sized salads for $8 a pop. That's almost impossible to believe in this day and age but it's true. To be sure, I've had a better salad in my life than the Tuscan salad from Voila. But I've never had a better take-out-ready-in-ten-minutes salad. That's for darned sure. What's more, I've never had a take-out-ready-in-ten-minutes-for-eight-dollars salad in my entire life. That I can guarantee. So, we bought the salads, carried them to the park and ate in peace. Bonus.

So anyway, Megan had a fruit-nut salad that was a little bland for her liking. The mandarin oranges were canned, the strawberries fresh (though clearly not from-Michigan-fresh), the lettuce crisp and the dressing very mild. In all it was a good meal for a picnic in the park.

My tuscan salad consisted of romaine, red onions, grated cheese, grilled chicken, hard salami, ham, turkey and weighed in at a pound and a half. It was epic, and tasty too. If you have to pick between these two salads, I have to say we both agreed the Tuscan was the winner.

Breakfast
They also do breakfast! Sure, the menu is limited (6 or 7 items?), but if you have the Bananas Foster French Toast you will only bemoan your inability to eat more...not the lack of menu options. Megan had the aforementioned B's Foster French Toast and I have to say, my crepes with Bavarian creme with fruit (some of which sure seemed to have come from a can...tsk tsk) were good..but the French Toast was divine. Their spinach quiche was great as well and I could easily be talked into that next visit (and yes, there'll be more).

Did I mention they bake their own danish pastries? We had 2 raspberry danishes (which looked stunningly like this one on Wikipedia) and they were also quite tasty. Light fluffy dough, perfectly cooked and not so large you have to feel incredibly guilty afterward. At only $2 they're a steal-and-a-half.

Though I've mentioned before that they offer outside dining, I should point out again how refreshing it is to find a restaurant in Michigan that has more outside dining than inside tables. At least it feels that way.

Dinner
There's something attractive about prix fixe dining. I think the lack of choices actually makes me feel like I'm embarking on an adventure. We ate al fresco yet again (third meal at Voila, still haven't eaten indoors), this time with a party of 14 adults and 5 children (under 7). When you've got kids galore, outside dining on a plaza away from any streets can be the kind of option that changes a restaurant from a special occasions place to a permanent fixture on your dining circuit. In our case, the outside-option, combined with prix fixe menu at $15/person made for an interesting connundrum: Lack of kids menu vs. perfect setting for kids to eat outside.

First the good:

1. Prix Fixe menu had a beef, chicken, fish option. Great for people avoiding red meat.
2. Potato tart was fabulous
3. Owner and Chef came to talk to us
4. Setting in the plaza (shaded during dinner, plenty of room for us to eat, room for kids to squirrel away the last 30 minutes of dinner)
5. DESSERT WAS FABULOUS. Literally. You can tell Arnie's is at work here as the cakes were outstanding.
6. The price: $15/person for a 3 course dinner is an unbelievable steal. It really is. You got a Caesar salad, entree, potato tart, veggie and slice of cake for that price. The cake alone, in any other restaurant, would have been $5 or more (leaving $10 to feed me a steak and salad....yeah right).

There were kinks. I'm sure it had to do with eating there on their first saturday in business, but a few of the problems were inexcusable:

1. Out of beef tenderloin, went and bought NY Strip, not everyone liked them...several at our table thought they were chewy. The owner tried to explain away the change "hey, you got a bigger steak" when he should have just given those folks their meal at a discount or something. Weird.
   
   
2. Out of diet coke? Fine, go buy me one at the 5 take-out places within walking distance. Rather than doing that, we sent a couple of people from our table across the street to buy diet cokes for us. How do you run out of pop anyway?
   
   
3. No kids menu. Seriously folks, this is EGR, home of more children than adults. Get a kids menu and take notes from Rose's too because they do it right (kid-friendly gourmet is better than the standard hot-dog, grilled-cheese, mac-n-cheese, chicken-fingers kids menu from 99% of american restaurants). Solve this problem and you would have sold food to 5 kids this weekend (rather than us walking to Rose's to buy pizzas).
   

That said, when the price is right you'll overlook problems. My overall take on the pace matches that pretty well. The prices are great, the food is good, the atmosphere is perfect and the restaurant will endear itself to the EGR community just by offering breakfast. In the end, I left the place assuming that we'll be back over and over, especially for breakfast but also for dinners.