I forgot to order the extra onions in my hashbrowns (which are an extra dollar) largely because the menu was so distracting. They would have been good, but the hashbrowns were good without them, cut chunk-style, cooked well and tasty. A little Frank’s hot sauce on them and I’m laughing. I ordered a side of sausage with my bacon, just to see, and was greeted with some of the most disgusting breakfast links I’d ever had. No more laughing. Links are sort of gross to begin with, but these were tangy and horribly odd, while the bacon was contrastingly greasy good. The eggs were as eggs are, hard to mess up, the toast was standard rye (other options: white or brown) but the coffee was weak and completely unsatisfying.

This could have been worse, but altogether it was a disappointing breakfast experience. The omelettes came with processed cheese, and we saw Safeway packaging lying around, indicating where many of our breakfast ingredients likely came from. This is another similarity to Jeffry’s. There were too many points of fail for it to be good (location, menu, sausage, coffee, no customers, kitchen fire), but not everything was bad (hashbrowns, eggs), which is keeping it above a score of 5. Go elsewhere.

Leif ordered the Apple pancakes which were awesome. The one winning meal of the table. Everyone else was angry at Leif because they were so disappointed in their breakfasts. Leif is awesome. [Leif wrote this]

May 1 2010

Schmecker’s Restaurant

3106 Portage Avenue

Schmecker’s Breakfast - $6.95 plus tax, coffee $2.25, served until 4:00pm daily

Schmecker’s is known for their Reuben sandwiches, and until now that is solely how I considered them. When I learned they had breakfast, I had to check it out, regardless of the Discreet Diner’s recent panning of the restaurant in general.

It’s in an ugly end of town (where Portage Avenue cannot decide if it is within or without the Perimeter Highway), and the exterior of the restaurant does nothing to lovely up the landscape. It’s as ugly as the no-tell motel next door, and when inside we were assaulted with the pungent odour of a grease fire from the kitchen. Much like when we went to Jeffry’s, there was a thin haze of smoke inside. (Note that both locations got the same score from us.) So right off, we weren’t impressed. That, and we were the only customers there, and they had been open for a while.

The menu was a farce of misspellings and capitalization fails. It seemed to be a dyslexic mix of Greek/Italian and English. I didn’t want to try their “Kalamari,” “spaghetti,” “parmigan chicken” or anything with Greek underscored.