Cafeteria review: At Dale's Café you can splash out cheaply

It’s like being in a cosy den, with books in the windows and soft sofas at Dale's Café. The food is prepared from good-quality ingredients, and the salad bar and burger are a real hit with Omnibus' reviewers. The only negative thing is the waiting time.

[Translate to English:] Både Anne Mette Torp (tv.) og Sarah Berg har gennem de sidste 12 semestre spist på et hav af AU's kantiner, og de betragter sig begge som kantine-gourmeter. Foto: Maria Randima
[Translate to English:] Foto: Maria Randima
[Translate to English:] Foto: Maria Randima
[Translate to English:] Foto: Maria Randima

Reviewed by: Anne Mette Torp and Sarah Berg, both twelfth semester medicine students

Food: At Dale's Café, Sarah orders a Royal Pilsner and the dish of the day: a classic café burger with oven-baked potatoes. Anne Mette chooses a sandwich with salmon and salad together with marinated cabbage and a rhubarb juice from Antons. It’s 11:30, but the food first lands on our table half an hour later. Luckily we arrived early, as by 11:45 almost all the tables are taken.

Sarah is happy with the burger filling - a spicy steak, pickled cucumbers, crisp salad and no less than two dressings - though they make it difficult to eat the burger elegantly. On the other hand, the burger bun disappoints a little. It is indeed crisp, homemade and looks healthy, but should rather have been soft and sweet, if we were to really give it top marks.

The sandwich looks good. It is made from the same sourdough bread as the burger, but is better suited to a sandwich, which should be crispy. It tastes good - though less cabbage and more salmon and dressing would have helped.

READ MORE: See all cafeteria reviews

Sarah and Anne Mette also share a mixed salad from the salad bar. Both are very enthusiastic about it. The salad bar says a lot about a café or cafeteria. Not all of them offer interesting and tasty food and combinations. But with lentil dip, hummus, fried vegetables in chilli and baked beetroot, the salad bar at Dale's manages to satisfy, both when it comes to taste, combinations and texture. Another plus is that you can take your salad or leftovers with as the café provides carriers for this

We share a whole Danish brunsviger cake for dessert. The cake is good and soft but it’s not dripping with butter and buttercream as we would like. This means it’s a little dry, though he still gets a high score for both consistency and taste. Both Anne Mette's latte and Sarah’s Americano are good and it’s also a plus that there are several different kinds of coffee to choose from.

Price: We paid DKK 175 for everything – a reasonable price. We have eaten food that’s better than standard cafeteria food, and the price matches the quality of the food. In our view, the price underlines the fact that Dale's Café is a place where you can splash out cheaply, but also somewhere where it’s too expensive to eat lunch every day for students. 

Atmosphere: The place is dark and grey in a good way, which helps to create an atmosphere of being in a cosy den, where you can mind your own business and talk at your own table without being bothered by other guests. There are books in the windows and the sofas help to make the place feel like a café. That’s a plus. With its location next to the International Center in the Vennelyst Park, which itself is a continuation of the University Park, Dale's embraces both the spirit of the university and the atmosphere from a café in the city.

Conclusion: The café has views of both nature and the port– if you stretch your neck a little bit. At the same time, the café atmosphere and the good acoustics at Dale's are hard for the other cafeterias around Aarhus University to match. You can say the same about the food. The ingredients are good and the quality matches the slightly higher prices. The only real minus is that we had to wait almost half an hour for our food because there was only one person at work in the café. It’s worth noting that we would have had trouble finding a table to sit at if we’d arrived just 15 minutes later.

 

Translated by Peter Lambourne