Derek Press

And now for something completely different.

My girlfriend, who I’ll call C, and I just had the worst dining experience of our lives. It’s Sunday morning, she wants a light breakfast – just some toast, hash browns, OJ. She suggested Perkins, I suggested a place called Granny’s Golden Oven. It had just moved from an old location to a new one, right next to a Perkins on the busiest street in the city. We decide on Granny’s.

We walk in to the former Pizza Hut building and are immediately confused as to whether we are supposed to be seated or wait for someone to seat us. After a couple of minutes, a woman directs us to a table, right next to the mostly-empty breakfast buffet and syrup that hadn’t been wiped up.

A few minutes later we are greeted by Granny herself, an older black and Southern-acting woman, who asks what we want to drink. We both order coffee. The coffee and water comes out, with no question about whether we wanted cream or sugar. Fine, I’m ok with black coffee. Granny goes on to explain “how we do things here.” She says you can get things off the buffet and order some other stuff like pancakes, waffles, eggs, etc. to order and they’ll bring them to your table. After saying this, she glances at the buffet and says “Though at this point, it looks like there’s only fruit on the buffet”. Ok? She mumbled these things so we just agreed and she goes on her way.

We head up to the buffet and I get some crappy, obviously canned, fruit. There was also some weird hashbrown-type thing so I got a bit of that as well. After eating a few bites of that, C stops a waitress and asks if we can get some pancakes. The waitress says “Ok, and how would you like your eggs?” C replies “No eggs for me.” The waitress looks at me and I say “Uh, over easy” and then get asked “And what kind of toast?” What the hell is going on? “White.” “Ok, I’ll have that out in a bit.”

About 15 minutes later, two plates of eggs come out. C just looks at them and shoves the plate away (she hates eggs) and I unenthusiastically start eating them. One of them had basically no yolk, and the other had a proper runny yolk. I reach for the pepper (there was no salt shaker) only to find out it was empty. Fantastic. So I take a few more bites of egg and set the plate aside.

About ten minutes after this, two pancakes come out. WHAT!? TWO PANCAKES ON ONE PLATE FOR TWO PEOPLE??? We each take one and need to make a trip to the buffet for syrup. While this is happening, there are about 15-20 other people in the “restaurant”, obviously disappointed with everything going on. People waiting for food, waiting on coffee refills, waiting on the buffet to be filled up.

Apparently the cooks had a hard time cooking more than one thing at a time. Each group of people sitting at each table would get one item brought out a time. Every few minutes a waitress would come out with a plate of food and ask about three tables if it was their food. A couple times a cook came out with some nasty bacon and threw it in the buffet right next to the nearly-empty crusty gravy container. Nothing like waiting ten minutes between a pancake and a waffle.

So we grudgingly eat our single pancake and a couple pieces of bacon. When I’m nearly finished with my second cup of coffee I notice there are coffee grounds in my cup. YUM! I tell C I’ll take care of the bill and she heads to the car. Oh and that toast the waitress asked me about? Never saw it.

After waiting at the counter for another 5 minutes, a woman who had been hiding in the kitchen comes out to take care of me. She says “Ok, what did you have?” I threw my arms up and say “I don’t know! A couple of buffets I guess?!” She fiddles with the register and finally gets it rung up. $12-some. Great. I cautiously hand over my debit card and totally expect her to charge me $120 or something.

She looks around for a minute to find me a pen and hands me the receipt. HA! She charged me $1.28! I promptly cross out the “tip” line, total “$1.28”, sign the thing, and run out the door as fast as I can.

Now look, I try to be positive and understanding when dining at restaurants and will usually leave at least a 10% tip, even if the service is awful. This time, I just couldn’t do it. Worst service and food we have ever experienced. They didn’t even deserve my $1.28.

Good luck Granny, you’re going to need it.