No-B.S. Breakfast

BC and I have been pretty adventurous with our breakfast-going the past few months, and this past week was no different. We’ve been pretty good at trying new places, as well as finagling opentable points in the process. But this week backfired a bit….at least initially. We decided to try out Mr. Crepe in Davis Square (Somerville) because, well, we both like crepes and wanted a bit of a change from the usual greasy spoon stuff. Big mistake. We made it to the restaurant after the usual Sunday-morning crowd, so it wasn’t extremely busy at the moment, but that made no difference service-wise. The place is small, HOT, and extremely confusing. There’s no indication as far as seating yourself versus waiting for a hostess, and there is a hint that you order your food at either the cash register or the counter, but there are also menus on some people’s tables. In other words, WTF?

So we stood at the front of the place and put on our best ‘what the hell is going on’ faces, but in vain. We finally had to break down and ask the guy at the front counter:

who, realizing how confusing the situation was for new customers, made sure to put on his most uninterested expression and speak in his most dickish tone about coming up to the counter to order. We came over to the counter and looked all around for a menu of some sort, but there were none. By then EMO had wondered off, probably to smoke the hashpipe or purge, so we had to stop another employee:

to help. When asked if there were menus, she just kind of stared at us before taking one from a couple people who were already seated. By now there was a line of about six people behind us, all sans menus. There was no effort to find any more menus on the staff’s behalf, and by this point we were both sweating basketball-sized beads of sweat and were about ready to jump the counter and start throwing crepes and raspberry puree at anything that moved. Instead, we just dropped the menu on the counter and walked out, mumbling about how Mr. Crepe could kiss our ass.

Now famished and quickly getting pissy, we came across Rosebud Diner. It’s old, in a train car, and the inside is cozy. You can’t talk on a cell phone, you can’t read the paper (because there’s such limited seating) and the servers are all over the age of 60, call you “sweetie,” and in a Jets v. Sharks-like showdown, these women would take down Emo, Crepe & Co. in under 30 seconds.

In short, the breakfast was actually pretty good. It came in under 15 minutes, we didn’t want to kill any living thing while sitting there, and it was relatively inexpensive (by Boston breakfast standards). So if you’re anywhere near Davis Square and you’re looking for morning nourishment, send Mr. Crepe a one-finger salute for me and head on over to Rosebud.