The Toasted Yolk Cafe — Restaurant in Little Rock

This is an upscale breakfast and brunch cafe in far west Little Rock, AR (on Chenal just past Kanis going West on the right) that serves everything eggs and a lot more. It has a bar with a variety of featured speciality drinks ranging form $10 to mostly $12.

My wife had a medical procedure across the street this morning so after starving for three days, she was ready for a really good breakfast. THAT was delivered in proportions that made the pricing reasonable. ($13 to $16) She had the "Big Ben" Omelet and I had the Cowboy Scramble. Both were delicious!

Now for the rest of the story and the reason for the "average" rating. First, the hostess was not friendly nor welcoming. She seemed confused in seating us but as we left, she did wish us a good day. Service was SLOW! Very slow. Our server was nice and friendly, but was not efficient. It took way too long for him to come to our table to greet us and take our drink order. I counted four servers and the place was only about one quarter full at the time. Wife ordered Black Tea and I ordered black coffee. Both took way to long to arrive. The tea service was very nice. A full cup of hot water and a full pitcher of hot water. I got about a 2/3rd cup of coffee and when I protested and asked for a full cup, again, the response was slow. It also took him too long to come back to take our order. By the time our order arrived, my now half cup of coffee was too tepid to be a pleasure to drink. I thought the coffee could be stronger, but that is my taste.

When the food did arrive by a server from the kitchen, I asked for a full cup of hot coffee. She promptly brought over the coffee pot and I had to explain again, I wanted a FULL cup of hot coffee --NOT warmed up coffee in my cold cup. She took my cup and filled it with fresh hot coffee but I should not have had to explained it twice. The eggs and accompaniments were cooked perfectly. The biscuits, however, were a bit dense. They tasted good but lacked the fluffy lightness or true Southern biscuits. I asked our server if the bisques were made fresh from scratch and he assured me they were. H mmmmm.... as I passed the open kitchen door on the way out, I saw something that looked like a package of precooked biscuits or rolls. The meals come with what is called a "hash brown casserole". There was no menu option for real traditional hash brown substitution like is offered at Crack Barrel. We do not like the wet "hash browns" casserole from there either. They tasted OK, but these are not ral hash browns. They looked like the frozen packed squares you can by at most grocery stores. However, our server assured us they were also made fresh daily straining at 4:00AM. I'm still suspicious of that.

Finally, my pet peeve. Why is it so hard today to train servers to keep the trash (paper, etc) taken away from the tables as they pass by? Why do I have to ask to have the trash removed? This is an upscale place. With bright surroundings, clean restrooms, new tables, etc and they are not trained to keep your table cleared of accumulating paper?

Oh, and those clean restrooms. Four individual ones for any gender. Very nice. Very clean, but the automatic motion controlled paper dispenser only spits out 8 inches at a time. Far too little to properly dry your hands. Come on! Set the darn things to 18 inches!

Will we be back? I doubt it. Our Gold Standard for breakfast and brunch is still the Old Country Store Cracker Barrell. Its a 10. This place would be a 7 IF they can speed up the service and have some one on the front that really makes you...

Table number 11 on 01/26/23 at 10:40am

I went to brunch at Toasted Yolk Cafe and the server was nice and everything was going well until we placed our order. Once our order was placed, we waited for more than 45 minutes for our food to arrive. In the transit of those 45+ minutes, our server did not come to our table at all. She did not inform us of the delay of our food, she did not ask if we needed anything, or offered to refill our drinks. We would see her walk to other tables and cut through the kitchen to get to the other side. We saw a guest get seated at the table beside us a few minutes after we placed our order and they waited an appropriate time and received their food while we were still waiting for ours. I would have understood if there was a setback but we were left uninformed the whole time. The one time our server showed up to our table was 10 min before they brought our food out and she only brought us only a bottle of syrup and left quickly before we could ask what was going on or for a refill of our water.

The food tasted good but the amount of money I paid was not reasonable for the portion I got. I was very impacted by the extremely tiny hashbrown casserole portion. It was the size of my palm. Mine was not the only one with such a small portion, my daughter had the same side and hers was even smaller. The amount of time it took to prepare our food and the cost of the meal is completely unreasonable for what we received.

One thing our server was very quick about was bringing the bill to the table. We were not even halfway done with our food when she had already left the check. That did not bother me as much as her coming back 5 minutes later to collect the check and we were still not done eating. We gave her the card the second time around so she would leave us alone but there was still plenty of food on our plates, as we were still in the process of eating.

The service was so poor that for a moment, I imagined the cooks going to a farm to get the eggs to prepare our meal. That is how long everything took for us.

We came with great expectations since our first time was so lovely. We did not eat anywhere and came with an appetite ready to have a relaxing brunch but after having the experience we did, we did not even enjoy our meal.

This was the worst experience and poor attention I have gotten in a restaurant. It was truly so disappointing. If I come back, I am considering eating before I arrive at the restaurant to avoid fainting from hunger since it will take so long to...

Can’t rate the food as we finally left…but we got on the online waitlist, waited patiently well over the time quoted. Understanding it can be hard to accurately quote time, I didn’t go ask at the desk until we waited 2 hours. We had a party of 7, hostess said that was the reason for the wait-waiting on a large table, shouldn’t be much longer. I 100% get that 7 is a lot and it takes us longer when we go eat together. We moved inside to wait so we weren’t out of sight/out of mind…then heard who I can only assume is the manager tell the other large party waiting when they went up to complain “you are second in line, but I’ll go ahead and seat you first”. When we inquired as to why, he was defensive and talked down to us. Got loud with my mother-in-law and said “if you wanna sit at 2 different tables in 2 different sections I can sit you now otherwise you have to wait!” The other group did not sit in 2 different sections. Last ditch effort-we saw 2 four tops empty and beside each other and asked if we can have those. Hostess told us no, manager said those are for smaller groups. When we said we don’t mind being split, she was rude and said it’s not her decision but the managers. Very very poor customer service. Don’t be condescending to me when I’m asking about the incredibly long wait and you clearly seating others in front of us. I can’t imagine this place will stay in business. Unless the food is amazing…which I doubt and will never know at this point.

So all that to say, fair warning-be ready to wait, maybe make a bigger fuss than the other groups so you can go first and don’t trust that the online waitlist means anything here or that you can expect even management to want...