Dreadful first/only experience a few weeks ago - don’t waste your time. Apparently the owner just wants to hang out with his friends and run off new patrons. He wins! We won’t be back.
The food here was okay - pretty typical diner breakfast food - but didn’t live up to the hype that we’d been reading for months prior to finally visiting… but I’m usually pretty generous with my reviews even if the food is mediocre and service does the bare minimum… unfortunately the service here was absolutely dreadful.
It all started when we arrived. We approached what appeared to be the host station at the porch stairs. A sort of cocky older guy who gave off “I’m the owner” vibes was hanging out chatting with customers that seemed to be friends and/or regulars. He gave us a few glances from his seat at a table about 8 feet away like “who are these two and what do they want?”
After standing there for about 5 minutes or so and watching this guy glad-hand at other tables I started wondering if he even worked there since he walked right by us to weave between tables. Without any sort of branded attire or name tag we started to wonder if maybe he didn’t actually work here… surely no employee - especially an owner - would completely ignore two well dressed brunch diners looking to hand over money in exchange for the cheapest and easiest to prepare food imaginable? They weren’t very busy and everyone including the servers were pretty relaxed, with open tables - so there wasn’t an issue of being short handed or being on a wait.
My wife, who had been the one so excited to try this place was starting to lose interest and suggested we go somewhere else but I was hungry and hadn’t wasted this much time and driven over here for nothing - just then we caught a server’s eye who realized we had been standing their for several minutes. She swung by and said “he’ll be with you in just a minute”. We watched “him” schmooze for another 5-10 minutes before approach us with a look on his face that said “sigh” even if he didn’t audibly make the sound.
Our new friend unenthusiastically asked if we wanted inside or out or first available. We’re good with the heat so we said out. He looked around without saying another word, handed us two menus and pointed 3 tables down the porch to an empty one - which it turns out was our instruction to walk ourselves down there so he could get back to hanging out.
We weren’t thrilled with the treatment and my wife repeatedly asked if I wanted to leave but I was as hungry as I was curious about the entire dynamic at play here. This guy seemed to see himself as the life of the party, but when two people with decent income, nice appearance and who dine out a lot, show up, we get treated like personas non grata? Surely we’ve missed something… let’s observe.
As we waited for our server, then for our waters, then for our food, our buddy continued shooting us sort of dirty looks from across the porch. But as each subsequent group of customers approached he got up immediately from his perch and greeted them with jokes and handshakes. I’m assuming some were regulars, but that didn’t seem to be the case for all. Either way, the 180 in his behavior was equal parts fascinating and annoying.
At some point toward the end of the meal I noticed an older woman hanging out near the man on the porch and she seemed a little more attentive to what was going on and looking around at tables. She even approached ours and asked if we needed anything and we politely said we were fine because at this point we just wanted to get out of there - but it seemed like she could tell by the looks on our faces we weren’t having a great experience, and it sort of felt like this was a familiar scene for her: The husband being a jerk to new customers so she has to come try to smooth things over.
For what it’s worth, our server was mediocre at best - but perhaps that was simply a symptom of the overall disfunction of this place.
As we ate I confirmed that other google reviews had experienced eerily...
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