Ole Pan American

I just got here and the place is closed on a Monday 6pm. No website; no phone number to verify business hours. Not professional at all. Very dissatisfied customer.

This is just a review for their burgers. Husband ordered a burger to go and raved about it. He loves burgers in general, but raved about this one indicating that it was very flavorful and moist.
Can’t say about other foods and service, but frequently sadly disappointed about restaurant quality in Richmond.

As another Unilocaler said before me, I would give this place 5 stars if it was based only on food. I’ve also been here several times, and the service is what gives it a bad rating.
You have to spend at least 10 dollars to use your debit/​credit card. Fine. The food is expensive anyway, so spending 10 dollars won’t even cover a salad. I bought lunch for my and a friend, which in total was about 25 dollars. I sat down to look at the menu further, and decided I wanted Yucca fries. 7 bucks. I go back there, and the hostess says — normally we dont do this, but I will today for you. mmmk. Do you want my money or not? I just spent 25, and not including all the other times I’ve been here. Thanks. The Yucca fries were disappointing actually. They were very greasy and gave my teeth an awkward rubbery taste afterwards. To their credit, that is the only thing I have disliked here.
Today, my friend goes in to order us lunch and brings in an energy drink with him. The hostess (a different one) says that he cannot consume his energy drink with his food, so he will have to take it to go. Are you serious. For as expensive as this place is, you shouldn’t be giving people crap about drinking a non-​alcoholic beverage that you don’t even serve. So we ended up taking our taking our food to go and eating it outside on the trunks of our cars.
Never going back there again. Your small inconveniences have cost you three customers today, Olé.

First let me say I would give 5 stars if this review were purely based on food. I’ve been here 4 times now, and I’ve not been disappointed. I’ve had lamb, seafood, chicken, kobe beef, all of which have been excellent. They offer gluten free buns and yuca fries. It’s great!
That being said, I’m giving a low rating because there are plenty of great restaurants in the general area that offer equally good fare but have much better service.
When my husband and I came here today, there were only two parties there, so the restaurant was fairly empty. There’s a sign that tells you to place your order, have a seat, and they will call you when your order is ready. So we ordered and had a seat. Now, I understand this type of service when restaurants are extremely busy, and if there had been a lunch rush, I would have little complaint. However, my husband and I were the only people without our food, the woman at the counter was literally doing nothing but standing there, so I don’t understand why they can’t go the extra mile to just bring us our food. We ordered a salad and two burgers. Our salad and one burger came up first, so they called our name and we got the first two items… fine. But just as we were taking a bite into our food, they called our name for the second burger. Again, I understand they set the expectation when you come into the restaurant, but for the price point of the food, they should make an effort at least when they’re not busy. Seriously, once the lady called our name, she went back to doing absolutely nothing!
Also, if I’m going to pay $ 15 for a burger, I should not have to ask for a key to the bathroom. I don’t even have to get a key when I go to Starbucks. It’s not like there’s a risk of transients coming in and using the restroom. Also, the restaurant is small enough for someone working there to recognize if a person is just coming in from off the street to solely use the restroom. It makes no sense. It’s like nice restaurant meets highway gas station. I don’t understand the reasoning behind a key to a bathroom in a place like this!
Finally, a little thing, but annoying… my husband asked for mayo when we ordered. The lady told us the mayo comes on the side, which led us to believe they would just omit the side of mayo. Instead, they gave us the side of mayo, which tells me she didn’t care what we said, or the restaurant is just wasteful. Either way, it keeps me from wanting to come back.
That reminds me, we were here some months ago and they had a basketball game on which nobody was watching. We asked if they could turn to the Giants game, which they refused to do??? It just seems like they don’t care about the customer.
In summary, if I’m in a pinch and need good food, I’d come here, probably for takeout. However, if you want a better priced burger that is just as good, go to Grazzy Burger on San Pablo. Same quality food, better price, better service.

First off, if you’re not going to allow changes to your burgers, then at least offer a PLAIN burger without cheese or undercooked bacon. You know, a true CLASSIC burger.
Liked the fries.
Second, what’s with the Fort Knox action on the bathrooms? I don’t want to ask the person handling my food for the key to the head. It’s disgusting! Stop it.

We live in Marin & this was our first trip across the bridge to try out Olé. It was well worth the effort. My wife & I both had burgers which were large, juicy and served on a delicious roll with tasty fries. We’ll be back! This is not in the scary part of Richmond, in fact it is very easy to get to & just few blocks off the Marina Bay Parkway exit on Highway 580

I love Olé! Everything on the menu is always delicious and fresh. You cant beat the daily meal express, an amazing value! Check this place out!

Shrimp ceviche was really refreshing and tasty but didn’t come with tortilla chips or tostada or even saltine crackers. Needed something crunchy to go with it. Nice ambience in the marina bay.

Truly a treasure and wonderful place to eat at, out in Richmond!
It’s not your typical Richmond restaurant. Quite the opposite and close to the Marina which is wonderful. Very quiet and with such a beautiful surrounding.
The venue itself was uniquely decorated. For example, have you ever seen the movie Brave? The dining area with the iron clad huge chandeliers, romantic lighting but still family friendly. Spacious tables and seating arrangement. Restroom is clean and spotless.
I ordered the spicy ribs and it was delicious. Every bite was the same as the first. The ribs were very succulent and tender.
With a glass of white wine, my dinner was perfect!
Lastly, the staff was wonderful and friendly :)
I totally recommend this place! I will be coming back for more!
Happy eating!
Toodles~

I’ve only come for the first time for brunch, and it was amazingly well-​cooked.
My kobe beef clasico burger was cooked perfect: ordered medium, came medium. Nice flavor; lots of care put into the burger preparation. Buns were brioche. love that. Toasted on both sides. grilled, crisp bacon and well-​melted cheese on one bun. Lettuce and red onions, with side cup of mayo for dipping.
Skinny fries served here. Portion is small. Bistro prices that are unusual for a strip mall that is half-​dead. $ 12 – 15 entrees… Def on the heavier side.
Italian owner here, also proprietor of Botto next door, is trying to fill in a niche in MB. He was hanging out at the other al fresco (hence only 2) table, chatting in Italian.
Other lunch menu ordered was grilled chicken sandwich on artisan bread.
Smallish, but nice touches as well.
Extremely slow service. The apps and tapas looked wonderful next door, especially those empanadas, and some honkin slab of chop meat. I salivated just with a quick glance!
PS The interior is well-​done, and nice. Pleasant to the eye. Calming. Little surprise once once steps in.

Finally decided to visit this place since we live so close. I’ll try and keep my reviews to the point.
1) Not a fan when the cashier, who also handles your food, has to hand you a key to the restroom. Sorry but how can YOU be sure the previous person who touched the ladle and key washed their hands… enough said.
2) You go to the counter, order your food and then seat yourself. The cashier basically stood there (awkward!) and I felt rushed, although there was no one else there. She also forgot the only thing I really wanted to try… empanadas.
3) You get your own plates, silverware, condiments and ice. I wasn’t a fan of handling the ice scooper, who knows who touched it before me and if they washed their hands. Ice and scooper could potentially be dirty… just unsanitary!
4) I ordered Escabeche De Pollo. It sucked. I’ve made home cooked food better than this. First, the dish was cooked with slices of lime in it and on it, so it was very acidic and bitter. That was all I tasted, acidity. Second, the Spanish rice was rice pilaf with long grains and peas… that is not Spanish rice!
So…my overall review is that I’ll never come back here, not worth my time and money. They restaurant décor was nice but I’ve been to enough restaurants to know they’re system doesn’t work.

I live in this area and was excited that a new restaurant was opening. The restaurant has a nice cozy feel to it. The prices are quite high, but the food is good.

The worst food I’ve had in a long time. Seriously, this place prompted me to write a Unilocal review which I haven’t done in at least a couple of years. I got lured in by the 4 star Unilocal review-​thought it was my duty to add my experience.
It was kind of expensive and the food was not good. We ordered:
1) Chicken Chicharrones– fried chicken nuggets that had no seasoning and were extremely rubbery. They were also unevenly cooked-​some a little burnt.
2) New York steak-​my husband ordered medium and it was cooked well done. He was kind of relieved when he was told that they had no more steak to cook as a replacement so it was just taken off the bill. I should say, aside from being overcooked it was just not tasty.
3) Quinoa and Kale salad– sadly, just not very good. It was also mostly made up of mixed greens-​odd that it was billed as Quinoa and Kale salad.
On the + side: the woman who took our order was very nice and readily took the steak off the bill.
The restaurant is not very inviting to eat in. You order at the counter and then take a table. We were the only people eating there at 7:45pm on a Saturday night.
The waitress did tell us that their primary chef was off that night and was apologetic about the food. She encouraged us to give it another try. Odd that the primary chef would be off on Saturday night though. Anyway, it was so bad, we won’t be back.

Another great restaurant from the guys from Botto!
Fantastic food! I had the following, which were all terrific:
Deviled Eggs — fantastic with the fresh crab
Cebiche De Camarones — sooo good with a sweeter taste
Chicharrones — wonderful crispy morsels of chicken
Zapata — da wife loved this!
El Capitan — wonderful Kobe beef
Samba Del Mar — gotta be my favorite so far. so much seafood goodness!
Can’t wait to go back and try the other offerings. Y’all gotta check it out! What ya waitin’ for!

Found this place on Unilocal and decided to give it a try. Wow, what a surprise ! Great food. Simply great. My sister ordered a seafood dish (mussels, crab, shrimp) in a sauce that beats anything you’ve tasted in a high end french restaurant. I had the grass-​fed Kobe burger. Do not pass this up. If this restaurant were in San Francisco, you would have a hard time getting a table.

Yum!
This is a collection of tastes unique to the chef’s vision. We did a sampling of appetizers and sandwiches, and I can’t wait to go try the other things on my next trip.
My favorite dish was the tower of Tomato salad (aka Tomate Frito). Fried battered tomatoes mixed wonderfully with a composition of other ingredients were a great start, and not something I’ve seen on other bay area menus. We sampled a variety of the empanadas that were hot, crisp and savory (my fav was the mushroom and cheese). A perfect match with a cold IPA! The crab in both crab sandwich versions, open faced with aioli and crab cake style burger, tasted really fresh.
This ain’t your father’s burrito shop (not that there is anything wrong with that). Check out the menu online before you head over, because if you are expecting a beefy burrito supreme, you are headed to the wrong place.

We are blessed in our little corner of the world to have Botto, a «for real» Italian place with fresh pastas, traditional Italian main dishes, and some of the best pizza outside of the homeland. And now the boys who are responsible for Botto have opened Olé Pan American, and it’s just as good!
Olé is right next door to Botto, so if you don’t have a taste for something specific the choice of which door to go through might be hard, they are both so good. But this review is about Olé, so …
The menu is not too large, only a few choices in each category, but they are the rights ones and there is something to suit everyone’s taste. So far I have had the Kale and Quinoa salad (delish), the lamb burger (wow, was that ever good, and huge!) with shoestring sweet potato fries (oh so yummy), and the empanadas (comes with three different dipping sauces, each more delicious than the last).
These are strong flavors, for the most part, each very distinct and full-​bodied. The boys of Botto have done a good job here, and I look forward to many, many happy meals here.
Prices are moderate and reflect the fine ingredients and care taken in the kitchen.
You should come, you won’t regret it.

Disclaimer: I am fortunate to have the co-​owner as my neighbor.
What a treat! I was able to enjoy a night of multiple delicacies and flavorful expression. As a new place, some of menu is still being tweaked, so I was really pleased to see and taste how many things he nailed really well. Our party mostly had the small plates, not main courses.
Let’s see if I can remember them all:
— Deviled eggs– Oh man, best anchovies I’ve ever tasted. EVER. These are not your white grandma-in-law’s picnic Deviled Eggs. No gingham plastic picnic table tablecloth in sight. Though, as a rule, I’m always up for some ambrosia salad. (It’s the tiny marshmallows! Frozen in jello!)
— Lilliputian pomme frites like the fine silky hairs of a deep-​fried angel– Salsa was great, but did not stick to fries very well, so it required some ham-​fisted forking-​and-​shoving into mouth. However, thin fries = more surface: volume ratio = MORE OIL. Awesome.
— Quinoa and kale salad– fantastic! Hearty but not overbearing. never thought to make curly dinosaur kale raw salad. fantastic. Deserves a Rolling Stone cover. More than Jimmy Kimmel’s butt crack, which I have been staring at at my gf’s kitchen table for the last seemingly month and a half. That’s a very low bar, I understand. But seriously, amazing salad. I promised to substitute some of my insane cabbage salad cravings at home with kale salad henceforth.
— Breaded and fried tomatoes– Tower of hot, crispy-​and-​soft goodness. Good enough for the best chick flick ever, though not sure if they were green. Great, powerful (towerful?) presentation.
— Chicharrons– Chicken, so my Chinese ancestors were guardedly optimistic due to their non-​pork provenance. Oh, ghostly guilt masters, abate thy wrath. Flavorful, strongly salted.
— Ceviche– Shrimp (cooked) and fruit. Green mangoes were a nice touch.
— Yucca fries– a good breather. Sorta like ginger in between sushi, except in this case, fried and the size and color of Homer Simpson’s phalanges. Mild, so save a spicy salsa from another dish if you need the flava. (May include other spicy salsa in the future.)
— Open-​faced sandwich on flatbread– JAMON! ’nuff said. You’ll never get fine pata negra jamon iberico here– the gov’mint saving us from ourselves again– but this was really, really tasty. Good flatbread, too.
— Rabbit empanadas– very tasty, flaky. liked the trio of sauces. due to my long-​standing friendship with a few Argentinians, could not stop thinking of my friend’s chimmichurri sauce.
— Mussels: couple I had were FANTASTIC. Sauce was a perfect balancing partner. Some party members were not happy with the oceanic flavor. It’s a seafood BOTTOM FEEDER. That you are eating whole. They filter out all the crap that we dump into the ocean and make a tasty chewy body– that also has its own musselly crap inside. Even enlightened liberal Bay Area mussels raised in mixed-​gender mixed class LGTB gun-​free organic free-​range North Coast waters are still mussels. All I can say is that the two I had were mucho perfecto. Nothing gristly, muddy, or uni-​y; fine texture and flavor.
— Portobello burger– great bun, tied it together well. At this point, the burger was a comically unnecessary caloric assault on my body/​temple, but we opened up the city gates and warmly welcomed it in. Please, stay here at the city Adipose site. You’ll be right at home.
— and, the best thing I’ve tasted in a long time (and that was a tough call, given the rage-​against-​the-​boring-​flavor-​machine items I outlined above) — LAMB TARTAR!!! Horseradishy. Lima beans bringing up the rear flank. SUPERB. If Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross tasted these, he’d get a pair of these on a string because, taking inflation and the economic crisis into account, these days it takes LAMB TARTAR BALLS to sell real estate. And he’d win the Cadillac– FIRST PRIZE! Not for the weak, vegetarians, or small children. I know the owner, and trust him to prepare raw lamb meat safely and– most importantly– tasty.
Ok, that’s all I can remember. There may be some slight tweaks by the time you check it out, dear reader, but let me give my unqualified recommendation. Say it together now… OLE!

«Remember when you first went out to eat with your parents? Remember, it was such a treat. You go and they serve you this different food that you never saw before. They put it in front of you and it was such a delicious and exciting adventure…» — Elaine in Seinfeld
Foodies… Richmond never had it so good. No need to venture to Berkeley, Oakland or SF for top shelf tapas and ambiance.
Small Plates
— Deviled eggs topped w/​anchovy & wild mushroom-​truffle pâté… BUCKLE YOUR KNEES GOOD — be sitting down with a glass of wine when you take your 1^st bite.
— Colombiana salad: had grilled portobella, hearts of palm and other goodies… YUM!
— Empanadas: Had very delecate flavors, use the salsas sparingly so you get the flavors of the rabbit and butternut squash.
— Cebiche: nice contrast to the hot offerings… cool juicy prawns and mango clensed the palatte nicely.
— Papitas: Extra thin & crisp good paring with any seafood dish, especially the Samba Del Mar
— Chicharrones were crisp, goodness — morsels of chicken with a jalepeno dipping sauce will remind you fresh ingredients and love is what makes simple dishes stand out.
Large Plate
— Samba Del Mar, a dish of seafood goodness… half a crab, half dozen each of clams & mussels, prawns, tossed with a fantastic sauce had a smokey complexness. Spent the last 5 minutes trying to soak up the sauce in Focaccina
GREAT space, little lounge on the right when you walk in, if all you are looking for is a beer/​cocktail and a small plate. Several 4 tops and 2 grand farm tables for groups or community dining. Value ratio is HIGH for the quality of the ingredients and portions. Can’t wait to check in to try the open faced sandwiches and burgers (Kobe beef, Serrano ham, piquillo peppers, to name a few toppers).
Check it out… you won’t be disappointed!

Olé’ just opened a few days ago — I decided to try it because I’ve eaten at Botto next door, which is owned by the same guys, and loved it.
The food was fabulous — We had the salad with quinoa, which was fresh and deliciously seasoned/​dressed. The empanadas with rabbit had wonderful flavors but was not overly rich — the sauces were so good, I ate them with a spoon. We had a spicy chicken dish (i’m forgetting the name) that was succulent & had just the right amount of spice. The homemade salsa that came with the chicken was amazing. We also had the yuca fries — lightly fried, great flavor & consistency. Yum! Can’t wait to try more of the menu.