Outer Monologue

The Jukebox Grill

So today I'm playing at being a Torr and doing an area restaurant review like they do...

This weekend was a busy, as I had to work late on friday night and then again from 11pm saturday night until 6am sunday (plus commute).

But even so, we wanted to get out and have some fun this weekend!

So saturday morning (well, closer to mid-day) we rolled out to get nice breakfast before we headed out for some apple picking (more on that in a later post).

Mary and I are both something of breakfast/brunch fans, especially at diner-like restaurants. My love of it mostly stems from the fact that I rarely eat a real breakfast during the week, so I like to go all-out when I can on the weekends. That and the full-on pancake, eggs, bacon, etc breakfast (and occasionally dinner) was always a big deal in my house when I was a kid.

Mary had done some investigating, and we settled on a place called "The Jukebox Grill", which serves lunch all day long and is right off campus.

We got there and the place was pretty crowded, but there was one table still open, with nice comfy lounge chairs at it, so we scampered over and had a seat. It was also right by the TV, which was helpfully showing the Spartans game (it being college football day), so we watched that while we waited for our food and ate.

And let me tell you, we waited. And waited... and waited. But more on that in a moment.

The Grill was a cute setup with a combination of booths, standard tables, counter seating and a scattering of the aforementioned comfy chairs. It looked and felt like a combination of a hole-in-the-wall diner (in the good way; we like them) and a kitschy theme restaurant, but it had the comfortable worn look that only comes of love, care and a contant influx of college students.

The menu was pretty standard breakfast fare with some interesting variations as well as fairly standard lunch/grill fare (again, with some interesting variations (like a triple-decker grilled cheese sammy; gotta try that sometime).

After some indecision, Mary ordered the Cinnamon Chip French Toast and I ordered scrambled eggs, bacon hash browns and buttered toast (among my favourite breakfasts when eating out) and we settled in to wait for our food to arrive.

Suffice to say that service was slow. Now the place was fairly full when we got there (around 11:30am), so there's some explanation, but we hit the very tail end of the rush, and by the time our food arrived at the table (about an hour later), the place was mostly empty and people who had arrived after us had gotten their food before us. Plus my bacon (the most important part of any breakfast) arrived pretty much raw.

Now I'm not a crispy bacon freak who hates anything but charred bacon (like my sister), so when I say raw, I mean pretty much raw. That and the apple juice that I ordered to arrive with the food didn't. Of course for the latter, I didn't really expect it to arrive without reminder (no matter where you are, that's a bit much to ask).

The waitress took my plate back and immediately returned with new bacon (presumably someone else's) and we dug in.

The food itself was absolutely delicious and was quickly devoured.

I'd make a lousy restaurant reviewer, I guess, because that's pretty much all I have to say about the quality of the food.

Because of the quality of the food, we plan on overlooking the slow service and giving the place another shot (and likely more after that), and we frankly had a good time waiting anyway. It allowed for a nice leisurely morning (which gave me time to finish waking up), so I can't really complain.

From there we went on to the rest of our day, which will be detailed in a later post (probably).

In the meantime, here are some shots from the Jukebox Grill. Click on any of them to see a full-size version.

Posted by Campbell at September 18, 2006 11:12 AM