Georgia Grace Cafe (Gg's Cafe) — Restaurant in Ellicott City

While I understand Georgia Grace is an EC staple, it does not live up to expectations. On a recent Saturday morning around 11am, my girlfriend and I went to GG for a chill breakfast while strolling Main St. Knowing GG is a busy spot we expected to wait but our experience turned out to be worse than anticipated and quite frankly not worth experiencing again.

We walked in and about 12 people were in line (4-5 parties). The line began to wrap around towards the tables as we waited and I couldnt feel worse for the people sitting at those tables having to eat with herds of people standing over them. The workers should direct the line better or move the back of the line to stand outside as to not have to disturb people eating.

While we expected to wait to take around 10 minutes to place our order, it took 25 minutes to get to the front of the line for a few reasons. The cashier staff treated each guest as an opportunity to chit chat which is fine and what makes GG’s great but there comes a time when you gotta keep the line moving along. Second is they would stop to make everybody’s coffees and drinks before taking the next order. And third is we overheard the kitchen staff ask the cashiers to slow the line down bc they couldnt keep up with orders. Guess they have a staffing problem. Nonetheless waiting 25 minutes for taking orders of 4-5 parties is WAY too long and pointed out many opportunities to increase the flow of service.

Despite my girlfriend’s anxiety increasing to new heights, I played it cool and grounded her that we were in no rush and the food will be worth it. Unfortunately, I couldnt have been more wrong.

After finally ordering and finding a table upstairs, our food was brought to us pretty quickly probably about 10 minutes after ordering. She had ordered the shrimp salad sandwich on a croissant and I ordered the bacon egg and cheese on ciabatta. As you can see in the picture, I was disappointed with the amount of bacon that came on my sandwich. 1 piece. Only 1 piece of bacon on my BEC that cost $12. Already overpriced, I thought I’d at least get my money’s worth but that wasnt the case in the slightest. The shrimp salad sandwich was just ok for $20, and we got some falafel too which again are good but not great.

Ultimately the combo of poor service, mediocre food, and high prices has left me with zero desire for...

Yiasou, DC Baltimore corridor visitors. Here’s my field report on GG Café, deep breath, here goes. This rating of 3 is based on staff doing their best (5), baked goods (4), and food (3). No pictures, this time.

Situated on Main Street of charming, historic downtown Ellicott City, which was founded in 1772. Restaurant is clean, quaint.

I really wanted to love it, but the experience was a bit all over the place. If I were rating on baked goods and hot beverages, I’d give it 4. They put a lot of thought into gluten-free options and original cakes and bars. Of note was the Goat Cheese Cheesecake, which is Gluten-free.

The ordering experience is, rather, unique. You have to order first, then grab your utensils, and find a table, and food is brought to you shortly after. The line is physically and temporally very long. Once you’re a little over halfway through the line, it becomes obvious as to why:

Beverages, hot and cold, are ordered first, and handed to customers, before they leave to find a table.

Food is ordered second.

None of the staff, except for the line cooks, seem to have one job. The same person who takes your order, is making drinks, doing barista work, cleaning glasses, cleaning coffee machine, running food to tables upstairs.

It would be a lot more efficient to seat customers and order from the table. Most restaurants separate functions of dishwashing, barista work, food running, table bussing, order taking.

Now to the main order. We had Hot Chocolate, Earl Grey tea, Crème de la Crème Crêpe, Shepherd Omelette, Beef Souvlaki, Anthony’s tacos - over $90 before tip, with expectations high.

Tacos were menu described as on corn tortillas, which indicates handheld, as tacos should be. Instead they were in crunchy tortilla chip bowl, like a Tostito’s bowl. Short rib in taco was hot and juicy, but bland. Eggplant in omelette was undercooked. The souvlaki customer in our party liked it. Crêpe was supposed to have Nutella in it. Had to ask for some.

The people working there are friendly and do their level best. They work very efficiently within the system they have, but the system is too complicated.

Might return on a weekday for baked goods. Food not worth the...

It would’ve been a good experience but one of the workers was pretty rude because we were packing food and had a few extra containers on our table. We planned to purchase some bakery items and pack them separately to gift them to our family later. Which is why we were going to take some extra. But they made such a big deal about it so we left without even getting bakery items and very disappointed. We ended up just leaving the containers for them since they made us feel really uncomfortable about it. One of the managers ended up coming to our table to talk to us and seemed nice about it at first but told it us it was quite “odd,” which was pretty offensive. I even told her we were going to use it to grab cookies downstairs but still made us feel really uncomfortable and ruined our experience to ever come back again. She said next time to just ask but they shouldn’t just have it out if they’re going to make a big deal about it. Especially if we were going to end up using it for THEIR bakery items on our way out. We spent a good amount of money here too, just on 2 sandwiches and a crepe. My recommendation is to not just leave them out if they want us to ask for them anyways.

We used 2 for sure for our leftovers and had about 4 containers to pack pastries separately for other family members when we went down, not for personal use. I understand it is a small business that’s why we were trying to support this place and that is why I told the owner I was planning to buy cookies when I went downstairs. But I guess she disregarded that. If you’re arguing about 4 containers being taken from a paying customer, then that says a lot about you and the business you run. I didn’t think I had to explain myself to the first worker because she came across rude when she was asking about it interrupting my conversation...