Eat New Orleans* (#301, 6/29/14) – 69
This stop was one of those fate-driven stops. Looking around for a parking space in the Quarter on a Sunday afternoon and a car pulled out just as we were turning the corner, so we took the spot. It just happened to be in front of a place called Eat New Orleans. Somehow I had never heard of it, but we glanced at the menu, then some people leaving said it was great. We checked how long the wait would be and they said 20 minutes or so, so we figured we may as well give it a go – we had been up in the air on whether to have lunch or brunch, but their brunch items seemed interesting. Keeping in line with it making sense we stayed, some people in front of us must have given up on waiting, because our wait was less than five minutes. Unheard of for weekend brunch in New Orleans.
The menu is very interesting; and also interesting for me was that I didn’t get an omelet. I almost always eat omelets for breakfast/brunch. Instead, I tried some sweet potato praline pancakes drizzled with some sort of whiskey sauce. They were outstanding! I’m not sure what it was about them, but just very tasty. Another options around the table included a vegetarian quiche, fried green tomatoes and…toad in the grass. Toad in the grass was frog legs with poached eggs, of course. What else would it be? Anyway, all food was solid. I’m giving it a 38 out of 50 for food.
The atmosphere was good. It was a small place, but not tiny. Basically, it is two rooms with about 6 tables in each room. It was bright and clean and not too crowded (as in, the tables were shoved next to each other). I’ll give it a 20 out of 30 for atmosphere.
The service was good and fast, but…the waitress bugged me with a little bit of “local attitude.” She instantly took us for tourists. When I asked to sub out grits, she made a comment like, “Ohh, you’re scared, huh?” Umm, no, I just don’t like a lot of grits, so prefer to have something else. And then when asked about a sauce with the friend green tomatoes, she also acted like it was something too hard to understand to out-of-towners. Sorry, but we were just asking what it was; and when she said it, we were understood perfectly, we didn’t need a special creole dictionary to figure it out. Anyway, other than a weird attitude, service was decent. I’ll give it an 11 out of 20 for service.
Final score = 69.