Sunday Morning Breakfast Out: Take 2

Hubby and I went out to breakfast yesterday and decided to return to the same place this morning: he, because they serve “baked beans” (pork and beans to Americans) with one of the breakfasts, me because I was curious if the speedy service we received yesterday was the norm.

This little coffee shop, called Beanz, is inside the small Table View Mall and located directly across from the entrance to the Pick n Pay (South Africa’s answer to Safeway). At 9:30 on a Saturday morning, the parking lot was jammed and the mall…including Beanz…was busy. Bu the service was fast, efficient and pleasant, despite the place being nearly full.

Hubby and I returned this morning and it was a whole different story. Where yesterday we took the only available booth in the place, this morning there were only two occupied tables when we walked in. The young lady who brought us our menus…before I even had my sunglasses off and traded for my normal specs…took our drink orders and when Hubby started to ask for sweetener, her eyes flicked to the little container of sugar and sweetener packets already on the table.

If yesterday’s service was good, today’s was phenomenal. There were three employees out front…two servers and a manager…and nobody went without attention for long. Before our drinks were served, another server came and took our order, no quibbling over special orders (Hubby wanted a frank with his breakfast) and or quailing over scrambling the eggs. No sooner had our order been taken than the original server appeared with the drinks…and my Coke Light was a full 340ml can, not one of those puny little ones or a fountain coke which always seem to be just a wee bit flat.

The food arrived before Hubby had finished his coffee, and everything was perfect. Generous portions correctly prepared and served quickly…even the toast was hot enough to melt the butter spread onto it. During the course of our meal the server stopped by once to see if everything was ok, and my plate was removed shortly after I finished. There was no waiting around to pay the bill because the server was too busy chatting with a co-worker…nope, when Hubby put his credit card out with the little folder, the server was right there to collect it. By the time our bill was settled and we were on our way back to the car, we had been in the place only half an hour…

Contrasted with our experience of three weeks ago, this place was a breath of fresh air: good food, well-prepared, efficiently served, all at a cost of only R135, tip included!

Beanz, we are coming back! And if you are reading this in Cape Town, I highly recommend you try this place!

Getting out of Dodge...

Dodge City is a small chain of diners/restaurants in Cape Town. They have spectacular hamburgers and this morning we decided to try them for Sunday breakfast. Herewith, the letter I send via email to the management of the chain later in the day:

What is the point of having a great menu and eye-catching décor if the service is so poor your patrons walk out without ordering?

My husband and I were at the Canal Walk Dodge City at 10 this morning. There was only one occupied table at the time we walked in, and there were five employees and a manager on the floor. You’d think with those odds…three employees per occupied table…our service would have been stellar, wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be wrong.

The waitress was pretty prompt when she came to our table to take our drinks order, and my husband, who is diabetic, was very specific when he asked for Canderel or sweetener with his coffee. How long does it take to make a cappuchino and pour a Coke? The kitchen could not have been busy…there was only one other occupied table in the place and we hadn’t placed our order yet. I was beginning to wonder if the girl was hand grinding the beans, one by one, when she finally arrived with our drinks.

We had studied the menu and as soon as the drinks were served my husband gave his breakfast order. The waitress immediately informed us that scrambled eggs were not available. What?? What kitchen cannot prepare scrambled eggs, particularly when the restaurant is deader than Bob Mugabe’s ethics and the kitchen staff are surely contemplating their navels for lack of orders to prepare?

My husband changed his order and, just as I was about to give mine to the waitress, he noticed that she had forgotten the sweetener. He asked again for sweetener and, without taking my order, she left the table. We waited. And waited. And waited some more. Finally I asked my husband if he had seen where she had gone and he said she had left the restaurant!!

I approached the manager, who seemed absolutely clueless about the whole affair. Obviously, Dodge City was out of sweetener and the waitress had gone elsewhere (a neighbouring restaurant, perhaps?) to secure some. But she was gone so long that the conversation between me and my husband went something like this:

Hubby: What do you say that when she gets back, we just pay for our drinks and go someplace else for breakfast?

Me: You are reading my mind again…that’s exactly what I was thinking.

Hubby: So, when she gets back we just ask for the bill?

Me: if it takes this long just to get a cup of coffee and a coke, you’ll be in a diabetic coma before the food gets here.

When the waitress returned with the sweetener and delivered it to our table, we asked for our bill and she quickly delivered it to us. She did not, however, return to fetch the money/credit card and I finally got up and went to the register myself with cash. Nobody seemed to know how to make the register work to accept a cash payment. After two people fumbled with the machine (one of them the person I assumed to be the manager) the woman who had been fiddling with the ice cream display stepped up and put the transaction through.

All in all, this ridiculous experience took the better part of half an hour. Worst of all, it never should have happened.

Why on earth was the restaurant out of sweetener? Your menu includes slimmer’s meals…don’t you think those people will want sweetener with their coffee or tea instead of sugar? And no scrambled eggs? What kind of nonsense is that? How difficult is it to break two eggs into a cup and stir them around with a fork? Especially when the restaurant is empty and the kitchen staff is not under the pressure of multiple orders? And what is with the waitstaff standing around jabbering with each other while customers sit there waiting?

I’m sorry, but as much as I like Dodge City’s food, especially the burgers, I don’t think we are coming back. The service at this location has never been stellar, but quite frankly, today it just stank. I cook and serve a full breakfast to my husband every weekday morning and 30 minutes is enough time to prepare, serve, and eat the breakfast and that is without any staff at all to assist. There is just no acceptable excuse for this kind of shoddy service and lack of attention to inventory of such front-end staples as sweetener.

The only bright spot in the experience is that my husband, on my caution, decided not to inject his insulin before we placed our food order. Had he done so, he could very easily have passed out in the restaurant due to low blood sugar because the service was so unimaginably bad.

The Eggs and I

The Eggs and I

I am becoming rather annoyed with the eggs around here.

Yes, this is a “spoiled American” rant, as my husband calls it. But the truth is, I am accustomed to certain things about my eggs that are not part of South African eggs and, after four years, some of these things are starting to annoy me.

I don’t mind that you can’t find a white egg to save your soul. Since I no longer have little kids who want to dye Easter eggs, it’s no big deal to me if the shells are white or brown. But it would be nice if the egg shells, regardless of colour, were of a relatively uniform thickness.

What do I mean? Well, anyone who has ever bought and cooked eggs in America has an unconscious expectation that, when cracking eggs, the same amount of force is needed for each and every egg. Americans have this expectation because…well…that is their reality. I doubt it occurs to any American that egg shells come in varying degrees of thickness because in America, they don’t! I have no idea how they do it, but every carton of supermarket eggs that you open will have shells of uniform thickness…the same amount of force you used to crack the first egg will be the same amount of force you need to crack the sixth.

Why is this an issue? Well, in a typical breakfast I make between two and six eggs. I used to crack my eggs right over the pan, but no more. If the egg is thin-shelled, a sharp crack on the edge of the pan will result in shards of shell scattering into the pan like shrapnel. If the egg is thick-shelled, I will have to pound the egg on the edge of the pan numerous times…again, fragging the pan with bits of shell. Thin-shelled eggs burst open unexpectedly, leaving egg on the fingers and shredding the yolk, thick-shelled eggs require digging one’s nails into the barely visible crack and prying the egg open…again leaving egg all over the fingers and often resulting in broken yolks. It’s a good thing that Hubby and I both prefer our eggs cooked with broken, hard-cooked yolks.

Another problem is that South African eggs often have blood spots in them. Now, most Americans would be grossed out by the little quarter-inch bleb of blood floating around in their egg white and would discard the egg. If South Africans did that, there would be a lot of eggs go to waste since I see that spot in fully half the eggs I smash open here. Again, breaking the egg into a bowl allows me to fish out not only the shell shrapnel, but to remove those blood spots, which look like a scab if they are allowed to cook. Again, fingernails are the best tool for this, so again, goopy egg-fingers.

Boiling eggs here has been a no-win situation for me. First of all, no matter what I try, I cannot get the yolks centred. Why is this an issue? Well, have you ever tried to make devilled eggs with the yolk cavity only half there? What about dishes in which the eggs are supposed to be sliced or quartered for garnish? I know all the tricks…I’ve been cooking for half a century now…but South African eggs seem to defy all the rules. No matter what I do, the boiled eggs come out with the yolk almost clinging to the inside of the shell. Last night’s batch was the worst yet…the yolks had migrated to one end of the egg and when I peeled them, the white was so thin over the end that it peeled away with the shell leaving exposed yolk in its wake. I have no idea how South African cooks get their boiled egg yolks centred…or if they even do.

I come to the opinion that the egg industry here doesn’t apply the same…or even similar…product standards that are the norm in the US. For one thing, I’d never seen a rotten egg (off the farm, anyway) in America. Here, I’ve managed to stink up my kitchen with two of them in the past four years. Admittedly, they both came from the same supermarket chain (Checkers) which will never, ever, ever see me buy anything fresh from them again, but the fact remains that I bought a carton of eggs from a major supermarket here and two of them were stinky, sloppy, liquidy, disgustingly rotten. Since I am afflicted with one of those open plan kitchens, the stench quickly filled not only the kitchen, but the dining room too, and enveloped the breakfast bar between them, where my husband was making coffee and awaiting his eggs. Unfortunately, the second bad egg was opened a few days later, repeating the experience. I now stick to Windmill eggs from Pick n Pay, their freshness never having disappointed me.

Americans are also accustomed to having clean eggs. You know…clean…no feathers or dirt or chicken poop sticking to them. Apparently that’s not a big concern here, and another reason that scattering egg shell shrapnel all over the edible part of the egg is not such a great idea. Three of the eggs in the dozen I boiled last night had dirty shells…looking actually like dirt…and one had identifiable chicken poop clinging to it (Grandma Violet used to send me out to the chicken house to collect eggs…I know what a poopy egg looks like). Gone are the days that I simply opened a carton of eggs next to the stove and cracked them into the pan as I wanted them. First it’s a wash, then into the egg basket, then a crack into the bowl followed by a smell test and then a fishing expedition to remove shell splinters and blood spots.

Making breakfast sure isn’t what it used to be!