Berkeley Bowl West Cafe

My friend & I eat lunch here at least twice a week due to convenience, but we always leave content, satisfied and eager to try something new.
Food: Expansive menu with casual, tasty and fresh lunch options. The offerings on the menu are pretty consistence, but they also have a few seasonal offerings. From simple grilled cheese to more intricate shrimp & avocado salad, they have plenty of guilt-​free and gluttonous options. You can also modify and/​or substitute various orders.
Ambiance: Super casual, huge space with plenty of seating, large windows for your daily dose of Vitamin D. Quick table service and/​or to-​go. I love that they have a self-​serve microwave, ice water and condiments section available for customers.
Service: Limited interaction with employees, make sure you bus your own table before heading out.
Price: Not the most authentic bites, but considering the quality of the ingredients, portions and location, it’s reasonable.
Overall: Variety of offerings, this is a great spot for casual lunch dining, studying or grabbing food to-​go after shopping at Berkeley Bowl.

I was excited to see that Berkeley Bowl West had a café! It was so cute and the spacious is so large with glass panels for the ray of sun to lighten up the seating area! I ordered the Hawaiian Chicken Burger to go. It took a bit of a long time for them to make and it wasn’t busy at all. However, the burger itself was a large portion for just $ 9.99! It came with either fries or a salad so I opted for the salad. The prices are cheap and portions are definitely worth it. I say, try it out despite the critics on Unilocal

I love berkley bowl and the café. And usually the berkley bowl staff members are extremely nice and welcoming, but the the lady in the café is extremely rude and irritable. its quite shocking for Berkley Bowl.

Eh, it’s OK, if you’re in a hurry.
My workplace is nearby, I didn’t have a lunch 1 particular day, & the food from my work’s on-​site café always upsets my stomach. So, I ended up at the Berkeley Bowl West Café. Time & effort was certainly factor in that decision.
No doubt the adjacent full Berkeley Bowl West store has lots more selection, but it’s always a zoo up in there. In the Café, it’s mostly just some sandwiches & salads, a few pizzas, & some pre-​made sandwiches in a cooler case.
I grabbed a pre-​made sandwich, no waiting, paid for it & was on my way. Curiously, there’s a large display case next to the seating area that’s empty. It seems the selection of menu options would be better if there was something in that case. Just sayin’.
If you’re near Berkeley Bowl West, need to grab a bite to eat, & convenience is more key than selection, then the Berkeley Bowl West Café is an OK option.

So wish I’d read these reviews before coming. Really, really poor food. Baffling since the prepared food in the store is good. Mac and cheese here swimming in grease (literally – I poured grease from it into a plastic cup, then tried to blot off more grease to make it edible, but gave up after drenching four napkins with a spoonful or two of the stuff). Tomato soup that managed to be both slimy and chunky (chunks were unidentifiable. Perhaps some kind of cheese? Soggy bits of what was once a croûton?) served with stale baguette pieces. Yuck.

i only ate here food bought from the store, if you come here launch is packed no seats left … so bring your own chairs :)

It’s so weird… Berkeley Bowl has always been well-​known for having scrumpdiddlyumptious to-​go selections inside of it’s quarters. So when the Berkeley Bowl West location popped up and included a Berkeley Bowl West Café, patrons (including myself) assumed that the food would coincide with the fantastic flavors we had always encountered in the main thang. Um, not so much.
What went wrong? I will never know, and I don’t really care. It’s totally irrelevant to me as I’m (slowly but surely) learning that it is better to find a solution than to complain needlessly about the problem. The solution is to march right inside the glory known as Berkeley Bowl West, grab yourself something from one of the prepared food counters and go have a seat in the Bee Bee Dubz Café (or on one of the outdoor tables if you’re up for sharing a spot with other custies) to enjoy that satisfying deliciousness. Problem solved.
They do have some coffee and tea options that I’ve found nice, but their coffee is ridic overpriced. Four bucks for an iced coffee?! Even Starbucks hasn’t skyrocketed to that level, bro.

Berkeley Bowel West Café is a solid place to sit down and grab a solid sandwich! It’s right next to the market, so its almost a no-​brainer that they will use the same high quality ingredients in making your food of choice! Great place to stop by and grab something to eat right before spending an hour shopping for the fridge and pantry!

The sandwhich counter is whack and has a terrible system number ticket system. I waited 20 minutes and my number was skipped. Furious.

Seriously had one of the worst lunches here on Saturday. WE love Berkeley Bowl West, but will not be frequenting the Café for a while. The staff did not take down our order properly and were rude when we asked for a correct sandwich to be brought to us. Additionally, instead of making us a fresh plate of food, the servers brought us a sandwich with a bite in it. And unlike many places, when we asked for a refund we did not receive our original order. All we got was attitude and a non-​apologetic $ 9.00. Definitely a huge disappointment.

You know what’s much better than the café? The prepared food inside the store. Get some of that and go sit in the café. In the café, the sandwiches that you order are extremely sub par, the sushi in the case is too cold, and the only menu is very far from where you order. Because I work nearby, I’ve tried 8 – 10 sandwiches, a pizza, the cobb and caesar salads. The quality is shockingly bad, possibly because the portions are huge and the prices merely average. It’s hard to believe such a terrible café is paired with a world renowned, quality focused grocery.
The only thing I’d recommend is the breakfast sandwich. That is pretty good, and they can do an over easy egg.

Food no better than a cafeteria. Grilled chicken breast was thin and greatly overcooked to the point of being hard and chewy. Roll was only redeeming part and tasty.
I’d only go back if I were famished. And even then, the deli inside Berkeley Bowl is much better.

This place is a puzzler. Why does one of the best and most exciting supermarkets in the whole country have such a strange and deeply unsatisfying café?
This has been a mystery since BBW opened a few years back. The physical space is quite nice, but pretty much everything else is awkward and poorly executed. Before you order you walk through a gallery of food prep stations. The designer/​architect of this space must have envisioned this as an area where patrons would be enticed by the food on display and interact with cooks at each of the stations. Instead, there is little to no food in the display cases, and not a cook or attendant anywhere in sight. A few poorly written signs are all you have as you decide what to order. The only employees you can talk to are at the cash register. These folk are harried, double as the baristas, and don’t know the menu very well at all. That would be fine if all BBW had on offer was coffee drinks and a few muffins, but the system is a complete failure when it comes to the many entrees and sandwiches on offer.
In the four or five years the place has been open, it is no less confusing on each visit. It doesn’t help that the food is not particularly good — on my most recent visit this meant ordering something described only as a grilled «Buffalo chicken» sandwich. The sandwich turned out to be a couple of pieces of sourdough piled high with some pressed chicken cold cuts and a bit of sauce. The cold cuts weren’t even heated through, although I’m not sure how much that would have helped. The accompanying sweet potato waffle fries were quite plentiful, but that was their only virtue! Not hot enough, limp, and without much flavor.
When the BBW market first opened customers were required to get all organic foods weighed and priced at a separate register before proceeding to regular check out. This was a royal pain in the ass, and to its credit BBW soon did away with this silliness. This anecdote proves that management is able to address problems once pointed out. Why on earth they continue to run their café in such a half-​assed and unprofessional way remains one of the great mysteries in Berkeley retail.
For now the great virtue of the BBW Café is that it is adjacent to one of the finest food stores in the land. Is it too much to hope that maybe someday it will be worth visiting in its own right?

Another update, which is slightly more positive than the last review. I ordered the seared ahi tuna sandwich again and this time, the way it usually is cooked– not well done. It tasted so juicy!!! So much better because it was so dry as mentioned in last review when it was cooked all the way! The sweet potato fries were so crunchy and smelled so good! However, it took me a while to get my food because they had so many orders to take care of.

It’s like I died and went to produce heaven. Loved the cafeteria there. Everything was fresh and well done!

I dont live in Berkeley anymore, but whenever I drive thru the city, I always stop by Berkeley Bowl! I finally ate at the café and LOVED IT! $ 8.99 for a huge bay shrimp avocado salad with a whole avocado and very generous portions of bay shrimp (mixed with cucumber, other veggies, and mayo). The entire meal and even after we were finished we kept saying «I cant believe this was only 8.99.» It tasted amazing and food was ready quick. The chicken pesto sandwich was also delicious, especially the fresh house made potato chips. Definitely looking forward to returning for another delicious quick affordable lunch!

I don’t like to shop on an empty stomach (too expensive as I buy all kinds of stuff I want but don’t need) so stopped here for lunch before shopping.
Did I enjoy it? Surprisingly, not really. We spent $ 17 on lunch for two without drinks.
We had the Asian Chicken Salad, and the Seared Ahi Burger. The salad had a lot of good stuff in it, but the dressing wasn’t good… really bland and boring. The tuna burger had a ton of mayo, and the mango relish was made with not ripe mango. The tuna itself was good though. It was supposed to come with yam fries, but they brought limp french fries. They gave me yam fries when I asked, but had me return the whole plate including my half eaten ahi burger which was sorta weird. They couldn’t just bring me yam fries and let me continue eating while I waited?
There were a lot of families there, and it was super busy (read strollers blocking aisles, and kids running around.) So it wasn’t exactly relaxing. On the plus side, there is a Peet’s Coffee…
Next time I’ll eat someplace else before grocery shopping, and maybe get a cup of coffee from Peet’s.
9÷13÷14: Today I had a burrito bowl from the hot food bar inside the store by the cheese section. It was good.

I came here for the first time yesterday. There’s a pretty big selection of menu items to choose from. I still hadn’t quite decided until I got up the the register. I hastily picked the turkey bacon sandwich with fries. I was just under $ 10 without a drink so not super cheap. I got my number, found a table and a few minutes later, my order came. Okay, I’m usually one to rave about a sandwich but this sandwich and fries was so good, I thought it was worthy of my time for a review. The turkey was juicy and real. And what i mean by real is that it was sliced off a turkey, not some turkey product roll that came from some processing plant. The bacon was very good as well, but what took it over the top was the big chunks of avocado. And then there were the fries. There’s not much fried food that I don’t like but these fries have some sort of seasoning on them that was quite yummy. All in all, I was very happy with my lunch and would recommend it to anyone.
Side note about berkeley bowl. I went in to browse around after my lunch. Although I like the types of foods they have but does one really need to be offered 15 varieties of apples??? Too many choices made me kind of dizzy so I ended up not buying anything.

Count me in.
I came here yesterday for lunch with a friend, craving a dripping meaty sandwich. (Okay, that sounded really weird. And I’m going to be honest, I had just seen this picture:
.) The Kyle caught my eye immediately: a roast beef sandwich with… well, I didn’t read the rest, I was sold already by the roast beef. My friend had the lasagna.
Sandwich was everything I was hoping for. Drippy, tender, flavourful, perfect. I almost proposed right then and there… but then it was already gone into my stomach. It also comes with some potato crisps which were pretty good too: crispy and not too salty.
The lasagna was rich and creamy, very nice. And comes with an enormous side salad.
This café definitely has the «workweek lunch» type of feel, but the sitting area is clean, spacious and gets a lot of natural light. It’s a tiny bit pricey, but expected for this kind of café. Would definitely come back.

I will miss Berkeley Bowl when I move to the MidWest. At BB, you find many local and fresh ingredients for your next meal. I buy my yogurt here, from a local farmer in Sonoma, amazing.
When you buy something fresh, it taste so much better than frozen or national brand ones!
I also the produce selection here, you can find orange, green, pink or even yellow mini-​carrots here!