The inside is huge, super spacious and very bright. In fact, the only colors in the entire restaurant were black and white, which made the place feel a bit cold and not very cozy. Since we had a fairly big party (4 adults and 2 children) they did kindly give us the large booth in the back of the restaurant. This allowed the kids to kick and scream and not really bother too many people. The menu here is an odd array of dishes and I can't quite figure out what type of cuisine they are going after. They have a pancakes (pear, lemon and ricotta, and buttermilk), blue crab omelette, fried rice and egg, lamb burger, and chicken salad just to name a few. Weird mix right? While I generally would go for a more traditional brunch dish such as an omelette or eggs any style, I was strangely intrigued by the spicy veggie fried rice with 2 poached eggs ($11). I was mainly drawn to this dish because I am obsessed with a traditional Thai fried rice that comes with a fried egg and I thought this could be a close dish. Funnily enough, Deanna and Nima both got this dish too, so we were all pretty uncreative. Luckily, Dave got the lamb burger ($12) and after seeing it, I kind of wish I had gotten that dish instead.
When the fried rice dish first came out, I was super excited because it looked great. I saw 2 poached eggs over a bed of crunchy fried rice. I excitedly poked the eggs hoping to see a super runny yoke. Sadly when I poked the eggs, it was more like a hard boiled egg instead. As many readers probably know, one of my biggest pet peeves in brunch place is a restaurant's inability to correctly poach an egg. I mean that is one of the most basic cooking skills! So despite the fried rice part of the dish being pretty darn good (it was crunchy like the bottom part of a paella that is scrapped off the bottom of the pan), a runny yoke would have definitely made it a great dish. Unfortunately it wasn't just my dish that had a bad yoke. Deanna's eggs were also pretty well cooked so it seemed like it was more of a pattern than a one off issue. But they did manage to fry the egg on Dave's burger pretty well because as soon as he bit into it, it oozed yoke. I was so jealous looking at it. I don't understand how a place can be so inconsistent with their egg preparation. I should also mention that I also got a side of house cased maple sausage ($4) and honestly it was too sweet for me and didn't have enough of that meaty flavor to it. But I will say that the size of the sausages were huge and you definitely get great bang for your buck when you order it.
As for service, our waitress was super sweet and nice but it took forever for our drinks and food to come and then it took a while to get our bill. So in short, nice but slow service. The place was an interesting find but the inability to poach an egg really put it on the lower end of the fork rating.
Photo Credit: Yelp
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