Urban Onion Restaurant

This restaurant is closed! They lost their lease as of Dec. 31, 2015. How do we make this establishment disappear from Unilocal

I am sad to hear they are closing. The food was ok but the drinks were out of this world. One of my favorite date night spots.

Let’s be honest the food is not great. The drinks from the bar are amazing if I had more than one might have made the food more bearable they had one wait staff for a belly dance show. A show that happens a lot there. We bring a lot of people
I waited 40 mins just for my check and got attitude when I asked for it seriously I could have walked out and not paid not I’m not that kind of person. I even stood up at my table for some time before he even cared.
I understand that there was only one guy cooking but the wait time was terrible and getting the waiters attention was like pulling teeth and we wanted to buy food.
If I could give no stars for the food and staff I would.
The bar is amazing and I would continue to drink there for sure. The belly dance show was awesome and I’m glad it’s a space to dance in I hung out with a lot of great people.

Walked there on a short visit to Olympia. The place is huge and dark. Small bar large dining/​dance area. Place was practically empty. The flat breads were good, cracker type crust, quality ingredience. Service a wee bit spotty.

This is Olympia’s only real gay bar. Jake’s has been taken over by straight sorority girls and frat boys looking for $ 1 drink specials.
The Onion is classy, well maintained, staffed by Dan the cutest bartender ever, and features great entertainment in a convenient location. Vaulted ceilings, brass and oak and marble, antique tables and modern art. A proper soundstage with equipment, good acoustics. Pleasant staff and extremely clean for an Olympia bar.

Disappointing… Food was sub-​par, service was very slow, wait staff mixed up our orders, and whoever they choose to provide entertainment for the night was terrible.

I have been here a few times now. Each visit was a great experience. They have love music often and always great food. I are here last night with my mom and a good friend of mine. I had the stuffed portabello and it was phenomenal! I devoured it lol it was cooked to perfection and it was presented well. I suggest this place for great music and great food and drinks, although the music is a little loud and the wine is a little pricey — 6 dollars per glass of white Zinfandel.

Service was great but the food was very sub par. Got the blue cheese fries but it was literally dressing and not much chunks of blue cheese. Also did the goat pesto flatbread which was kind of dry.
Also, there is no happy hour despite what their website says!

I have been to the Urban Onion twice now. The first time was decent, the most recent time, so so.
Urban Onion is listed in LGBT media as a gay bar or restaurant. It more or less is but there doesn’t ever seem to be a whole lot going on here ever. I went with a group of people for an event here thinking that some drag queen karaōke was going to happen but it was just regular karaōke and lots of the people there were straight! Lol! It’s not a problem with me. I love bars with a mixed crowd, gay, straight, it does not matter.
There were two drag queens that were there but they only doing fundraising and did not sing and left fairly early in the evening. They came down from Seattle.
The Urban Onion is very much a small town gay bar and from what I am told Olympia has a fairly small LGBT community anyway so maybe that explains why things were so slow. It reminded me much of where I moved from which was Fort Collins, CO where the only gay bar there has up to as many as fifteen people in one night (gasp)
the bartender once said before looking at me and saying «So what do you want to know?» Good Lord!
No, the Urban Onion is not that bad and it is actually nice that Olympia has about 50,000 people and has three gay bars while Fort Collins, a city of 120,000 people only had one and was apparently struggling to stay open!
Both times I have been here I have ordered something to eat. The first time I was here I had the hamburger. It was pretty good, no complaints.
The second time I was here I did not care for my meal as much. Maybe it is that regional difference coming into play again. The food tasted just fine but the portions were terribly small and I left there more hungry than ever. I had a small salad which was good but I also ordered shrimp skewers. I guess back in Colorado ordering skewers was a meal in of itself, like a ka bob kind of meal. On my skewers the shrimp were very small and there were only two skewers on top of pico de gallo. It all tasted fine but was far from a meal. It would have been ok if they had them listed in the appetizers section but they had their own section which led me to believe that they were a meal. The lady I met with there for my movie group mentioned that skewers out here were more like appetizer sizes. We both ordered some dessert. She wanted to share my pumpkin cake with me but realized very quickly that that too was pretty small and was not really a sharing size so she ordered her own cake. As I already said, the food is good but not so great when it comes to good portion size!
The atmosphere of the Urban Onion is inviting and the staff has always been nice but my last experience here has made me reluctant to get further meals here because of the portion issues. Perhaps it is best suited as a place where you just go to to drink.

We stood at the door for 10 minutes waiting to be seated. Not 1 employee ever acknowledged our presence. I had to intercept one and ask «Do we seat ourselves or just keep standing here?» The employees reply was that they were busy and it was going to be awhile… then walked away. Bar had 8 chairs open. 2 tables were available. We left and ate at the Terayaki place next door. After reading the reviews here on food quality, I’m glad we did. We came back after eating for some local music which was pretty good.

I usually do not write negative reviews. My «M O» is to just not go back. However this deserves some comment so others who used to frequent The Urban Onion for a meal do so with caution or not at all.
The Urban Onion has been a mainstay restaurant in Olympia for many years. Sadly, the «restaurant» we visited Saturday bears no resemblance to the Urban Onion we used to frequent nor a restaurant for that matter.
The service was painfully slow — and with only two tables were full. The kitchen was even slower. My suspicion is the waiter, who was often missing, was helping an overwhelmed, under-​skilled cook get meals to customers.
So what’s the real rub? The food quality really was bad.
One in our party ordered the clam chowder. Out came this watery «something» in a soup bowl that had more curdled flour/​milk grains it than clams. My wife’s salad came with apologies for missing ingredients («we are out»). I had eggs, toast and potatoes. Jam and butter came in ramekins. I swear the jam either had been sitting out all day or came from some one elses unused serving. It was dry with a dry skin on it. I then felt the underside of my entrée plate and it was all gummy underneath. Hopefully from the server or cook and not poor washing.
This is not the Urban Onion of past. In my opinion, it is no longer a restaurant of present either. If you want to call yourself a restaurant and serve food, get it together!

Absolutely disgusting food. Slow service, took 45 min to get a sandwich. I will never come back here.

I really love eating here with friends or my sweetie. The food is good, I enjoy it being empty during the day so you can have a conversation, the music makes me happy (Americana, 40’s style)
But my last visit made me and my sweetie pretty upset towards the end. We were enjoying our favorite spot, which we feel safe and comfortable in for it being a gay bar/​restaurant. However towards the end of our visit we had a gentlemen (not our server… we think bartender) make a comment while we were having a cute/​close moment of holding hands and kissing (not obscene) «All right, remember we’re still in a restaurant» it was incredibly rude and we could’ve been having any sort of intimate moment and one would not walk over to interrupt us. I don’t know if he was internally uncomfortable or what but after informing our server what had happened he responded with a genuine «he’s gay, I’m gay, it shouldn’t matter.» It left us feeling really uncomfortable and almost not safe to be ourselves in that space. Which was one of very very few we felt we could. Thank you to our server for being willing to accept our discomfort and still make us feel welcome as we left. As for the other guy, you need a hug or something. Stop projecting bitterness onto others.

I really like the food here, but I just wish the service was a little faster. It’s pretty dead during lunch, but there is only 1 cook and 1 server for the entire place. Each item is made to order, which is a plus, but it takes awhile for the food to come and then the check. I still like it because of the cool ambience (feels like you are in New Orleans with the jazz music playing, and the interior balconies) and nice location across the street from Sylvester Park, but as I only have an hour for lunch, we don’t come here very often. No lot, but street parking is available, at least during lunch.

My husband and I found the Urban Onion when we first moved to Olympia, and couldn’t understand why it was always so empty, or why our friends made negative comments every time we mentioned going there. We found out.
We were really attracted by the menu. It’s a pared-​down menu with some nice, nutritionally balanced offerings. We love the haystack sandwich (which has a California vibe with sprouts and avocado) and the shrimp tacos are among the best in town. We’ve had less luck with other dishes that just weren’t cooked so well, like the shrimp scampi.
The space is huge and has a kind of shabby elegance to it with giant windows and a vaulted ceiling. It can be a comfortable place to hang out, as long as you can stand the broken-​seated chairs (there are pillows around to bolster them). For a long time, we tried to take friends there and sell them on the fact that it’s a good place to have a relaxed drink and hang out. Eventually, our friends confessed that they didn’t want to go back.
The real killer there is the service. It’s SO inconsistent; and when it’s bad, it’s just the worst in town. We have had good experiences with servers who were attentive and accommodating; but with other servers, we’ve had trouble getting menus, getting refills, getting our food cooked to our order… It completely depends on who’s working that night, and sitting down feels a little like playing roulette.
To make it even worse, the management really seems to have a hard time staffing the dining room and events at the same time. We had two experiences where we just could not get table service in the restaurant while there was something going on in the back room. The first time, the waitress and the bartender had a very tense stand-​off over who was going to wait on us, and the end result was no service for the better part of an hour (bartender gave in eventually). The second time, we waited at our table for 30 minutes without service. When I went back to the kitchen to ask if there was someone we could tell our order to, the waitress snapped: «We have a banquet going on, so we’re doing the best we can.» It was absolutely the rudest service experience I’ve ever had. We left and went to Cascadia (where we marveled at the professionalism of our server, and the timeliness of our food), and we’ve never been back to Urban Onion since.
As far as I’m concerned, this place is a candidate for one of those restaurant makeover shows. I think there’s potential there; but they need some serious help.

Super yummy lunch! I had the portobello salad and my friend had the turkey pesto sandwich — both were great. Good portion size and a good value overall. The space itself is super funky and interesting as well. I’d definitely go back!
(I’d give it 5 stars if the chairs were better… They need some sprucing up!)

I attended the bar side of The Urban Onion last night for a friend’s birthday. It was a Saturday night and the place was dead! There was Karaōke and that was fun, but not enough to make up for the rest of the experience.
The jello shots were WAY too strong and tasted like straight up alcohol. Every single seat was broken and awkward to sit in. And the bartender was depressing because it seemed like he hated working there, so it was unpleasant to go up to him and order.
All-​in-​all, it was a good experience only because I was there with friends, otherwise that bar is pretty mediocre.

I used to eat here 10+ years ago and liked it a lot! I went there once a week for over a year and at that time I would have given the place 4 stars.
However, I returned six months ago expecting good food and service as I remembered it and was sadly disappointed.
I had a hard time finding gluten-​free items and ended up ordering a fresh carrot juice with a salad. I asked the waiter for his suggestions on gluten-​free items. There wasn’t any guidance nor did I get the feeling that he cared at all.
The waiter came back to our table and let me know they didn’t have enough carrots to make the juice for me because they had to save the remaining carrots for dinner. Wow. Really? Okay.
So our food came out and the salad was huge with a slice of their round bread on top of my salad. Not gluten-​free, which angered me as any amount of wheat in my system causes great pain in my body. I took it off and gave it to my friend to eat and then I didn’t eat the lettuce the bread was on. The salad could have been better if they took the huge sliced red onion rings off the salad (though I reminded myself that I was at the Urban Union). I prefer diced onions on my salad instead of huge rings but I guess that just comes down to preference. The service was not good at all and I will not be returning to this restaurant. Also, whatever they did to the interior wasn’t to my liking.
They would do well to have Robert Irvine from the Food Network channel Restaurant: Impossible TV show visit and make the food and customer service better. Just an idea.

My husband and I can be very indecisive when it comes to choosing a restaurant (okay, when it comes to other things, too — but this IS a restaurant review). More than once, we’ve found ourselves in downtown Olympia having a conversation that goes something like this:
«Do you want to go there?»
«No.»
“Do you want to go there?”
«Maybe… no.»
«Do you want to go THERE?»
«No.»
“Sigh.“
Then, just as we’re about to give up, we’lll either stroll past the Urban Onion, or one of us will happen to remember it.
«How about the Urban Onion? We haven’t been there in awhile!»
«Okay!»
Then we’ll go in, eat a pretty good meal, go home, and forget about the Urban Onion until the next time we can’t decide where to go.
Admittedly, I can’t say that any of the five or so trips I’ve made to the Urban Onion have made much of an impression. Not that it isn’t a nice place. I actually really like the dim lighting, and the 1970s-​ish interior. The noise from the adjacent bar doesn’t really spill out into the restaurant, so you don’t have to worry about noisy bars. (Or maybe we just eat there on the bar’s slow days.) The wait staff is usually pleasant, and I can’t recall ever having to wait too long for service.
The menu (which used to be huge) still offers up a nice variety of selections. Most of the time, I order one of the pasta dishes. Nothing has ever stood out to me, but everything I’ve had there satisfied my taste buds well enough; and I’ve never found a hair in my food or anything gross like that.
They have good bread.
In a word, I would sum up the Urban Onion (which I kind of still wish was spelled Herb and Onion) as «reliable.»

New menu… same plastic plants
The Urban Onion is attempting to put itself back on the map by abandoning their old menu with something more straight forward. Their focus is geared towards local and seasonal items with a greatly reduced menu size, matter of fact I was little taken aback by the one page of options, but I am a firm believer that it’s better to have a limited menu that works well than have a massive one that is hit or miss in quality.
That being said, the Onion still has some kinks to workout. I ordered the special, a sausage sandwich with roasted red peppers held together by their homemade bread, and I use the word held together very loosely. The sandwich had a good flavor, little on the greasy side, the bun however disintegrated the moment you picked it up due to the fact that is was no more than an quarter of an inch thick. This made for difficult consumption and left me wondering which dimensional plane had my bun disappeared to.
The dish was accompanied by fresh cut fries, something that I simply despise because places usually offer soggy scrapes of potatoes and call them fries, but the Onion has gotten it right. The fries were crispy and relatively uniform in size, perhaps the best fries in downtown Olympia right now.
Other items at the table: soup of the day, which was described as «can tasting», and halibut and chips. Again, fries were a plus here but not a big enough one to save the fish which was sent back due to its lack of flavor and freshness. The waitress made sure to comp. the fish from our final bill.
Regarding the service, it was a bit slow during the late lunch hour mainly due to the fact that there was only one waitress and seemingly one cook, approx. 25 minutes from ordering to table. I never mind waiting for fresh food, the exact thing they are aiming for. I am not sure they have hit the bull’s-eye yet when it comes to that arena but at least they have stepped up to the firing range. I will be giving them another go but it’s not high on my list of places at this point.