My spouse and I dined at The Prado
for lunch on a Thursday afternoon in early July 2018. The restaurant is open
for lunch daily (approximately 11:30 am to 3:00 pm) and dinner on Tuesdays
through Sundays (after 5:00 pm); between those times, the lounge offers light
snacks and drinks. You can make a reservation using the online Open Table
system. If you arrive without a booking, the host will add your name to a
waiting list and provide you with a buzzer sounds when your spot is ready.
The Prado is located in
Balboa Park’s House of Hospitality, just off the Plaza de Panama. The House of Hospitality was originally
built as the Foreign Arts Building
for the Panama-California Exposition of 1915. Intended to be temporary, its
name was changed to the House of Hospitality for the California Pacific
International Exposition of 1935. In the late 1990s, the historic building was
demolished for structural reasons, but architects reconstructed it using the
original building as a model, including an interior (but al fresco) patio
courtyard with a fountain.
The restaurant offers both
indoor and outdoor seating. You can choose to sit in the bar room/lounge, which
offers seating at a tiny bar, at a few high-top tables, at regular-height
tables (a few of which share a padded banquette), and a few on the front
“porch” surrounded by foliage. (Seating in the un-air-conditioned bar room is
unreserved and is therefore first-come, first-serve.) You can also choose to
dine al fresco on the multi-tiered rear terrace with views of the Cafe del Rey Moro gardens, the adjacent canyon, and the
downtown skyline beyond. But the choicest
seating is in the more formal main dining room, which is divided into two
parts: a courtyard room (with views of the piazza and its fountain) and the
solarium (with skylights and views of the terrace). The Hospitality House
Building and the Prado restaurant also offer private event rooms and banquet
facilities that can accommodate between 60 and 500 guests at a time, depending
on the room chosen. Varied décor showcases painted beams reclaimed from the
original building, stenciled ceilings, antique mirrors, wrought-iron candles
and lanterns, and blown-glass sculptures. We were surprised to learn that the
main rooms of the restaurant have no dedicated restrooms; we had to leave the
restaurant in order to use the public restrooms across the piazza.
The Prado offers American
cuisine with both California and Spanish elements; the dining room features a
more formal menu, and the bar room offers lighter fare. Because we did not have
a reservation and the wait was lengthy, we dined in the bar room on its casual
small plates menu. We shared a flatbread pizza and some mini tacos, followed by
the coconut flan for dessert. Despite our server’s promises to deliver hummus
and crackers, each time we asked him for them, he said they were on the way,
then finally admitted that the restaurant had no more hummus available! (We
would have settled for just the crackers, but he wouldn’t bring just those.)
Our light meal in the lounge
at The Prado was acceptable; however, we wish that we could have tried the more
formal menu in one of their more elegant dining rooms.
