Review Title: Quirky Breakfast Spot with Huge Morning Menu [ View All Reviews ]

The sign on the restaurant says since 1967. I've known about it since the early 90's when I saw them open up their Saratoga Ave. location. About fifteen years later I spontaneously remembered my curiosity about the place and went there for breakfast with Arsnova on Labor Day.

From the outside, it really doesn't look like much. It's got a "country kitchen-like" feel when you sit down, but it doesn't scream "funky Americana" at you from across the street or anything even close to it. It basically looks like a Bakers Square or Marie Calendar's restaurant, but when you get in, there's a lot about the place that's deliciously imperfect.

To start, the host and hostesses aren't uniformed. I'm not sure if they were part of the owning family or they just don't dress up, but I was a bit surprised when an old man in a baseball cap came up to lead us to our table. Our table was set with really tacky looking old china that were all stamped with the word "CHINA, Made in Syracuse, NY USA" or something like that.

The coffee was bad in a good way. It was classic roadside diner coffee that was strong, but tasted cheap and made no pretense about being some kind of "select 100% Arabica roast." I like bad coffee in the right place and this was one of those places.

It took us around 20 minutes to order. It was hard to make a pick when the menu has old fashion sausage biscuits with gravy, pancakes, buckwheat pancakes, crepes, tri-tip steak, omlettes, and all the breakfast fare you expect from any respectable breakfast menu.

I ended up getting sausage, eggs, hashed browns, with sausage biscuits substituted for the pancakes and up until the point of getting my food, everything had been "deliciously imperfect." Their way of fixing their sausage biscuits wasn't really my style and quite frankly, I didn't find their sausage to be to my liking. It was a bit too lightly flavored for me. Everything else was fine and I snuck some bites of ArsNova's bacon and buckwheat pancakes and wished I had gone something like that route instead.

I'm still giving this a thumbs up because I think my breakfast was mostly a fluke and it was the quirky and unusual sort of joint that I like. Besides, the full capacity breakfast crowd and the packed waiting area with people spilling out the front door must mean something. Also, they have peppermint stick style flavored candy sticks at the cash register and they're stocked in over a dozen different flavors including tutti fruitti. That's gotta be worth some points.

It's not the place to go for a finer breakfast, but a place for a finer breakfast with soul and fun. They have lunch and dinner as well too.