Friendly Toast Visited 3/4/2012 3.5 Forks

Friendly Toast 1 Kendall Sq., Bldg 300, Cambridge, MA 02139

As someone who doesn't have kids, I consider "brunch" time to start at the earliest at 11:30AM if not later.  But when you have kids, you can't wait that long.  I was visiting my friend who had 2 kids, so when she suggested breakfast/brunch, I had no idea that it meant going out at 8:30AM.  It actually wasn't too bad getting up that early.  But I thought that meant that any restaurant we go to would be totally empty.  Imagine my surprise that when we reached The Friendly Toast around 8:45AM that it was completely packed.  It was fully of other families and surprisingly lots of students (it's near MIT).  I remember being a college student and not getting up until noon, but I guess these MIT students are super motivated. :)

The inside of the restaurant is extremely quirky, fun, and just crazy but in a good way.  It's like a 50's diner on crack...there's tons of kitchy toys and posters all over the restaurant.  The kids get these weird coloring pages to go with their theme (Kavi got a page with these people in an accelerator machine).  The menu is also crazy and bizarre but in an awesome way.  There are probably 50 different items that range from a standard pancakes, waffles, and make your own omelette to a scramble with cheddar, avocado, black beans and salsa, coconut pancakes, and green eggs and ham.  I wanted to try a bunch of things but decided to go with a standard eggs benedict because I just haven't had a good benedict in years and thought this would be a great place.  I was super excited for our food but then we waited and waited for a really long time.  This is where I had to dock 1/2 fork.

By the time our food came out, half of the table was on the verge of a breakdown.  Finally when our food came, we pretty demolished our food in 15 minutes.  The benedict was solid: served on a nicely toasted english muffin, two well poached eggs (one was poached slightly better than another), 2 big slices of ham and then covered in hollandaise sauce.   So nothing out of the ordinary.   The ham was a bit salty but I guess that's pretty much how ham usually is.  The ham was sliced like it was hacked off a Christmas ham, so there wasn't a whole lot of "elegance" to it, but hey, I wouldn't rate this place based on aesthetics.  The homefries were pretty big chunks of potato and while they were fine, I thought that they could have been a bit more "mashed up" instead of roasted potato-like.  I didn't try Nima or Dave's food but they both looked interesting and fun.  Dave got the Ole Miss which toast topped with sausage, mashed sweet potatoes, scrambled eggs and a mango sour cream (cool sounding right?) and Nima got the "special" huevos rancheros which was a huevos rancheros served in a tortilla and topped with corn, olives and salsa.  The pancake Kavi got was about the size of a tire.  All in all, this place was totally fun to go but the slow service and the constantly crowded-ness is what knocked it down 1/2 fork.  Total bill: ~$40 total.

Photo Credit: Yelp