Fortnight of Friends РDay 12: City Park Caf̩

Today’s “Fortnight of Friends” set, the 12th in the series, is #3061, “City Park Café”.


This set comes with two minidolls, Andrea (last seen in Day 3) and a new supporting character, Marie. Both came packed in stretchy plastic. This set reverses the objection I had to yesterday’s set about reinforcing racial streeotypes at least, with Andrea as the customer and blonde Marie as the worker.

There are three bags in this set, but it’s still a two-step build – you open both bags 1 and 2 and use those parts together for the first part, the building. Bag 3 adds interior details and curb appeal. The building sits on two 8×16 and one 16×16 plate in a new sky blue color. I really like the interior details, as someone who’s designed LEGO restaurants before (Sushi Bar most notably). The salt and pepper shakers, ketchup and mustard bottles, and soft serve ice cream machine are really nice. And there’s a great assortment of new minifig accessories – pie, skillet with spatula, forks, knives, plates, and cupcakes. Lots of nice parts and interior details here.

This set has both printed parts and stickers. Mostly it’s stickers, but there is a nice cash register piece that I think is a new pattern (on a 2×2 45° slope) and the $100 green 1×2 tile for the till, as well as a 1×1 brick with printing as an orange juice carton. All the signs are stickers, which I found disappointing, especially since we’ve already seen LEGO is perfectly capable of printing things like the 4×6 tile with studs around the edges. But I got lucky apparently, as my box had two sticker sheets!

Tomorrow we have the penultimate set in our Fortnight of Friends series, #3188, “Heartlake Vet”.

2 thoughts on “Fortnight of Friends – Day 12: City Park Café”

  1. Yes, this set does reverse the awkward racial stereotyping of the previous sets. The only problem is, someone at TLG forgot to change the product blurb, which says “ANDREA works at the City Park Café and loves dishing out tasty treats, when she is not singing into her broom and daydreaming of her big performance.” That product description is now all over the Internet.

    If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think TLG were TRYING to put every stereotype they could find in the Friends sets. It’s really bizarre, because as far as construction goes, the whole theme is pretty sweet. But in terms of gender perception and racial issues, it’s just one big, hot mess.

Comments are closed.