It is 10 AM on Saturday morning. Our house guest is getting ready to leave, but we are all going to go out for breakfast first. I know it seems absurd, but somehow I thought that going to Blue Heaven would be a good idea. Perhaps we would get lucky and not have to wait an hour and half? Being that we were trying to move a little quickly, we drove to the restaurant. I thought it a rather good omen when we got a parking spot on the same street as the restaurant. I thought it a better omen still when as we walked through the back of the restaurant to get to the hostess stand, I saw three empty tables. And then we approached the hostess stand. Denied. That will be about an hour and twenty minute wait. Really? Then why the open tables? Oh, I get it, people already wait an hour or two for the pleasure of eating with chickens roaming at their feet, what’s another 20 or 30 minutes?
No thank you.
So, we leave. We discover that Grand Cafe on Duval does not open for breakfast, only for lunch, so more on that another time. Then we head to Pepe’s at 808 Caroline Street, where there is usually a wait, but it is often manageable. We are told it will be twenty minutes. By this time, it is about 10:55 AM and we decide to stroll across the street to Turtle Kraals. They have good breakfast, after all. We get there, the hostess tells us that we only have a few minutes until they stop serving breakfast and a waitress comes over and takes our drink order. She returns with drinks and tells us that in fact, they are no longer serving breakfast. Still hungry, we leave.
How hard can it be to get some eggs in Key West? We head back to Pepe’s to see how far we have gotten on the list. There are still eleven tables of people (yes, that is roughly 50 people) ahead of us in this tiny place.
When we were finally able to sit and get breakfast, it was good, as Pepe’s always is, but is an omelette and a remarkably delicious mashed potato cake really worth an hour wait? I don’t think so. the moral of the story is stay home and make your own breakfast on the weekend. If you are staying at a hotel and therefore need to go out for breakfast, have a snack first. You may not get breakfast until lunch time.
3 thoughts on “No Eggs For You!”
As an ex-bartender/server…a lot of times those open tables have to do with how many people they have working. There is a certain limit to how many tables any one person can handle while giving everyone good service, and as well, they can’t bombard those servers with 3 brand new tables at a time either. They need a few minutes to get each table greeted/drink ordered, etc. If one person calls out sick, it can throw the whole operation for a place as busy as Blue Heaven. Open tables doesn’t mean availability if there isn’t enough staff to handle those tables.
I agree. However (and this is a big one…) if a place is constantly jammed on a Sunday morning and they do not have enough servers, and they constantly have open tables, they should hire some extra people to work Sunday mornings both as servers and in the kitchen. Everyone is happy that way – people have extra work, customers don’t wait for ages and get pissy… win, win. By the way, this is my big complaint about Camille’s also, and why I won’t be going back there.