Hettie’s Delites Cafe

The owner is as sweet and nice as her vegan pies. It’s comfort food and it’s delish with vegan options galore. Highly recommend because exploring the shops makes for a nice afternoon. Unique and wonderful!

Pros: Some nice vegan options, friendly staff, decent food, interesting & unusual ambience, hot sauce available as a condiment.
Cons: Strong smell of bacon permeates the place (not good if you’re a vegan!); restaurant is a bit hard to find; you have to ask for the vegan menu; if you want water, you have to buy bottled water; we had to wait a long time for our food to arrive.
Hettie’s is a small, quirky place that’s hidden-​away in the far back corner of a large antiques mall called The Shops on West Ridge, located in Greece. The antiques mall is not the sort of place that you might ordinarily expect to have a restaurant integrated into it. We heard about Hettie’s from other vegans who had dined there.
The restaurant lacks a sign that’s clearly visible from the street, and we had trouble finding the place even after we entered the Shops on West Ridge. We wandered around for a while, and finally had to ask an employee of the Shops. We did, however, smell bacon as soon as we entered the building. The smell is quite strong everywhere inside the building, and especially in the Hettie’s area.
The place is small and has a low-​end diner ambience, with small tables and cheap, fold-​out chairs. There isn’t much separation between the restaurant and the rest of the store, with some little knick-​knacks (like Star Wars action figures) being offered for sale on shelves inside the dining area. The wall next to our table was decorated with 1960s-​era album covers mounted in frames.
The vegan/​vegetarian options are listed on a separate menu (by the way, why can’t they integrate everything on a single menu?), and you have to ask to see the menu. I had a triple-​decker club with fried tofu, and a side of home fries with onions and melted Daiya cheese. My wife had a breakfast melt sandwich made with tofu scramble.
My triple-​decker club was pretty good, if perhaps just a bit too dry for my taste. A bit of extra Veganaise would have fixed it. My wife’s sandwich could have used a little more flavor, and the tofu scramble was too wet. Maybe they could have pressed some of the water out of the tofu before scrambling it (or maybe they could freeze it before using it), although I understand that doing so would add work to the kitchen staff. My home fries were delicious, though. I almost wished that I had placed a double-​order of them.
There didn’t seem to be all that many customers in the place, but we had a long wait for our food. Luckily, we weren’t in a hurry.
Our waitress was friendly and attentive, and she ended up comping us the water bottles, to compensate us for the long wait.
I really like the fact that Hettie’s offers vegan options, and the homefries were outstanding. If Hettie’s were located closer to where we live, we’d probably eat there more often.