Olympia Cafe

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Olympia Cafe was a fictional diner or greasy spoon featured in a recurring Saturday Night Live sketch. Presumably, the hard-working but not very service-oriented staff (led by the late John Belushi) were Greeks, but it was hard to tell because they only spoke about half a dozen words of English. As various guest stars discovered, the only two items on the long menu that one could actually successfully order were the cheeseburger (memorably pronounced "cheeburgah" by Belushi) and the Pepsi. Attempts to order Coca Cola were invariably met with the retort, "No Coke, only Pepsi!"

The cafe in the SNL skit was based on the the Billy Goat Tavern on N. Michigan Ave in Chicago, which is still operating (and part of a small chain).

Despite the fictitious story given on their menus, the burger-restaurant chain Cheeburger Cheeburger took its name from the sketch.

Olympia is a Greek town after which many restaurants were named. During the 1970s, there was a real-life Olympia Cafe on the Upper West Side of Manhattan which was very similar to the diner in the sketch. However, one subtle difference was that orders for Pepsi were met with the reply: "No Pepsi, only Coke!"

[edit] See also