This past Friday, Nikola’s has (re)-opened where the Rusty Pelican stood sporting a menu of your basic Greek diner fare.
That’s “Greek diner”, which has more in common with “diner” than with strictly “Greek”: full breakfast of omelettes, scrambles (including the “Wallingford”: bacon, artichokes, tomatoes, mushrooms and cheddar), and benedicts, lunch of gyros, souvlaki, sandwiches and burgers, etc.
Nikola’s is the work of Costas Antonopoulos, the building’s owner and previous owner of Costa’s Opa in Fremont and an earlier incarnation of Nikola’s in the same location years ago, among others.
Nikola’s is open 9 am – 9 pm weekdays and 8 am – 9 pm weekends.
Really glad to have Nikola’s back in this space. The food was good and the service excellent, both especially considering it was only their fourth day, at brunch today.
i’ve been unable to find the web site for this Nikola’s.
Costas doesn’t have an email address. I don’t think a web site will be forthcoming.
My boyfriend and I decided to try Nikola’s for a late brunch on New Year’s Day and unfortunately, we wound up walking out after waiting what felt like 30 mins for a very simple order. [I never do this.]
I get that they’re still trying to work out their kinks having only just opened, but service was disappointing if not completely lackluster. [We should have taken a hint when we were barely acknowledged when we walked in.] We were promised that our meal was the next ticket to be fired up by a very apologetic server, only to have waited an additional 15 mins with several servers walking right past our table seeing that we only had water and a cup of coffee in front of us, still with no meal or anyone checking in on us or on our order.
For their sake, I hope they’re able to work the kinks out, but we have no intentions of returning any time soon.
had a good brunch, even bernaise sauce on eggs benedict !
We always enjoyed the original Nikola’s, so we went in for lunch on Saturday. It’ll be a while before we try it again. Soup was out of this world fantastic. Salad was good. They have no clue on how to make a sandwich or gyro. Service was absolutely horrible. And apparently appetizer in greek translates to desert. Really, she was very surprised we were expecting it before the meal.
Steve
We tried it for dinner this week and had a very similar experience to E30 Memorial. The soup and salad before the meal were fantastic, but the meal was “eh”. It was weird how so little traditional Greek food was on the menu. I got souvlaki and it was mediocre. The veggies it came with were inedible mush. The rice was bland. Our waitress was very nice but the owner (I assume she was) made no effort..and there were only 2 other tables occupied the whole time we were there. One nice things they did was bring up complimentary dessert. I told her we were appreciative but too full to eat it now, and asked if we could take it home, and her response was, “I don’t think she will let me do that”. Huh? They ended up letting us, but very strange. It looks just like RP. It is hard for me to imagine they will survive in that large space, between food, service, selection and decor.
Hmm, that’s too bad. I remember walking by Costas on the Ave a while back, scouting out a good place for dinner. We looked at the menu, expecting Greek food, but were completely turned off after seeing items like quesadillas, nachos and burgers highlighted so prominently.
When this blog announced the coming of Nikola’s a few months ago, the owner was quoted as saying that he didn’t think this neighborhood would appreciate Greek food and that he intended to go in a different direction. I cringed to read that, fearing that the new place would be more like the place in the U-district rather than his restaurant in Fremont. …Too bad, because I think a lot of us would be happy to patronize a place serving good Greek/Mediterranean food!