My wife’s been bugging me to try out the egg factory, so this morning we gathered up the kids and went to see how it was. After dropping my family off at the front door I find that parking is a huge problem, so I ended up parking on the street around the corner. We get inside and we are greeted by a crowd of people standing around waiting to be seated. Understandable; they were jam packed.
So we get our name put down on the list up front and start to pass the time with idle conversation, but then we begin to notice something odd: People continue to get seated immediately who have just arrived. At first this is a bit annoying until your realize everyone is calling ahead. Lesson learned.
Now when you’ve been there for about ten minutes you can see that the wait staff is way overworked for the amount of people they are serving and that quickly leads to a rather half-hazard approach to service.
We finally get in to be seated (waved towards the general direction actually) and wait another 15 minutes or so before someone finally (yes, I’m using that word a lot) gives us a menu and then runs off again. Over the next half hour or so, we begin to notice that the timing of the food service has nothing to do with the order in which you arrived. People are getting waited on and served their food in no particular order and my wife pointedly notifies me that many who have been seated long after us had already had their food arrive before we had even seen our waitress for the first time. Once again this tends to be more than a bit annoying and a less observant person might assume they were being singled out for bad service, but it is very apparent that the extreme level of disorganization has resulted in some customers (us this time) being completely forgotten along the way.
We finally get the attention of our waitress and she orders our drinks and food all at once while apologizing profusely for the wait. Another 15 minutes passes and a bus boy arrives with glasses of water, which I would judge is unfiltered tap water by the taste. Another 30 minutes rolls by before our plates of food arrive. I look down at the food eager to try it out, but alas there are no utensils to be found anywhere on the table. We mention this to the waitress and a few minutes later the bus boy stops by and supplies us with the means to eat our food.
So, it took us nearly an hour to get our food from the time we sat down, and that came just in time because we were very close to simply leaving.
So we finally get to the food! I’ve heard their radio ads occasionally and they advertise “we serve the food you would cook yourselves if you had the time.” Well, I’m not quite sure they intended it this way, but their slogan turns out to be amazingly accurate: Being a rather poor cook myself, the food we were served would be about par with what I myself could come up with at home. Not exactly a welcome experience after waiting nearly an hour to be seated and about that again to have food arrive.
I ordered what they called a Philly Benedict, which is essentially a Philly steak sandwich on a croissant with over-medium eggs covered in hollandaise sauce. The meat itself came bone-dry and the hollandaise sauce was so thin as to be nearly invisible in both color and flavor. My wife’s biscuits & gravy suffered a similar fate: The gravy too had very little flavor and looked as if the mix was not completely finished, as it contained a slightly chalky taste with no seasonings to be found. I dare say Dinty Moore’s canned gravy would have been a welcome replacement.
All in all, the experience was somewhat less than satisfying, but Julie, Bubba & Skittles, (our three dogs) were very grateful for the leftovers we brought home.
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