Austin Texas Real Estate - Homes

There is a restaurant in north Austin called “Opal Divine’s Marina“. It features an old black-and-white picture of a woman wearing a sailor suit and there are anchors on the sign. There is also a mural of the same woman on the side of the building, and in the painting she is standing beside the sea at night.

Here are a couple of photos I took to demonstrate (story continues below the pictures):

In addition to the above, you must understand that this restaurant took over the old location of a place called “Sea Island”, which was there for about 10 years.

By now, you are probably asking what the point of this post is.
Well, this is NOT A SEAFOOD RESTAURANT. I took my family there a few months ago thinking we would try out the new seafood place.

The one that closed was actually pretty good and it always appeared crowded during lunch and dinner, so I was surprised when it went out of business. Who knows? Maybe someone was mismanaging things there.

At any rate, we were shocked to realize that there really weren’t very many fish or seafood-related items on the menu.
In fact, none of us actually ate any fish during our visit.
The waitress seemed to be new and the service was really poor. In addition, the food was more what I would call “carnival quality” (like something you would eat at the fair) than prime cuisine. Needless to say, we haven’t returned, even though it is in front of one of our favorite stores, Fry’s Electronics.

As we were leaving, I told my wife that Opal Divine was an old mythical character who travelled around in her boat pulling bratwurst and burgers from the sea. I know exactly what makes my wife laugh.

Well, after looking at their website recently, I looked through their online menu and calculated that only 4 out of 44 of the items to choose from that day contained fish in any form, and two of those were tuna salad things, which hardly seem to be “seafood”, at least to me. I also noticed that Opal Divine was actually the owner’s grandmother, and that made me feel a little guilty for making fun of the name. They have two other locations, neither of which contains “Marina” in the title.

So, my question is….was it unreasonable to expect seafood during our visit? What gives? Maybe they were simply trying to capitalize on the perceived success of the previous restaurant, but this bait-and-switch seems to be backfiring, at least in our case.

Copyright 2007 Austin Homes