01.23.12
Restaurant Review — Broken Yolk, Corvallis, OR
The Broken Yolk, Corvallis, Oregon.
**
Two of Five Stars, but only for comic relief.
I’m a forgiving person. To have enjoyed The Broken Yolk experience, one fraught with staff members yelling near the top of their lungs, a fair amount of Northwest grunge and nearly all of the fundamentals of restaurant stewardship tossed aside, one would have to be, very, very forgiving.
So, yes, when it comes to restaurants, I am very forgiving.
To be fair, the restaurant was short staffed, so short that they closed an entire section. One of the only two waitresses, who also appeared to be the boss/chief-yeller, made the short-staffed situation known to every table very loudly so that every table heard each desperate apology. I suppose I heard the apology 15 or 20 times in the hour and a half it took to get and, quickly, consume my two pancakes (underdone) and two eggs.
Yep, an hour and a half. I timed it. Plus, I got the wrong pancakes.
The hour-and-a-half time was unique to me. In what would have been to most other patrons, disquieting, I watched, amidst the running and banging and frantic panic, like sitting in the middle of an overcrowded and lively fish tank, six different tables served before me who were seated after me (for this delay I was given free coffee by my apparently extremely stoned or extremely hung-over or perhaps extremely bemused and equally fascinated waitress). Whichever her condition, she moved slowly, like a happy, oblivious stop-motion cartoon character pasted into a PBS time-lapse film–picture an Eric Cartman cameo in PBS’s Journey to Planet Earth.
My bemusement at the unfolding food service wreck was not shared by my one-year-old son. Luckily the Broken Yolk has a small children’s play area and though Henry is not always smitten with adults’ conceptions of playable environs, he loved the Broken Yolk’s take and played happily the entire time. Otherwise, and I’d have to have left, which I considered doing a few times.
The food… It looked pretty good at other tables and I would return to the restaurant again to give it a try but on this day my eggs were Cold On Arrival (C.O.A.) and my pancakes were both blueberry–not what i ordered and a buck extra–and pasty white, underdone, almost wet dough.
Probably they deserve zero stars for this performance. But I’m forgiving. And like I mentioned, I would go back. We all have bad days. But if you step in the door and the boss/chiefyeller/waitress with a Hawaii tattoo on her calf is shouting apologies and the other waitress floats by in what looks like a chemically induced somnambulant coma, turn about quickly and run.
