No Longer An American Girl

I know it’s been a while. I’ve been meaning to check back in, but I’ve fallen victim to the Angry Birds. It’s an obsession.

Anyway, I’ve had a couple ideas of things I want to write about but haven’t mustered up the enthusiasm to put pen to paper, or in this case fingers to keyboard. Until this morning…

B and I were good and went to the gym this morning, and decided to reward ourselves with breakfast out. We were going to go to the diner down the street, but we saw a news program that did a segment on board games and featured the new Angry Birds board game. Of course, I have to have it and I convinced B that we should immediately go to Toys R Us to buy it. Since we were there, we thought maybe we’d treat ourselves to brunch instead.

We found ourselves sitting at the bar at Joe’s American Bar and Grill in Framingham. For those of you who know me, you know that once upon a time I loved this place. Not the greatest food in the world by foodie standards, but solid fare that didn’t disappoint. Granted, I mostly was going there to meet friends at the bar, but I was somewhat of a regular back in the day.

Joe’s is no longer my regular haunt, but B and I will still stop in every now and then. It was a no brainer to stop in for brunch. There entrees are always good, and they include a very tasty Bloody Mary (or you can choose a mimosa, screwdriver, or even a Bud Light if you desire). We arrive promptly at 11 o’clock and seat ourselves at the bar.

The place is practically empty, and it takes a couple of minutes for the bartender to appear. While it really wasn’t that long of a wait (to be fair), a couple of minutes can feel like a lifetime when you are thirsty. When B and I place our Bloody Mary order, we are surprised by the response.

“I’m sorry, we don’t serve alcohol until noon on Sundays.”

A little history for those of you not from Massachusetts… despite its reputation for being an extremely liberal state, Massachusetts still has a few very Puritanical laws on the book. One of them was that a restaurant or bar cannot serve alcohol before noon on Sundays. (But you can get yourself a nice eye opener at 8 a.m. every other day.)

Wait a minute… didn’t that law change? Well, yes it did. In July 2010, the Massachusetts legislature passed the Restaurant Rejuvenation Act which allows restaurants to – you guessed it – serve alcohol before noon on Sundays. The logic behind the act was that more people would go to restaurants for brunch, order alcohol, and business would increase. Along with increased business comes higher tax revenues from meal tax (and an alcohol tax which was present at the time but has since been overturned), and even income tax as more people work in restaurants on Sunday mornings.

For whatever reason, Joe’s American Bar and Grill and assumingly the Back Bay Restaurant Group (which owns Joe’s, as well as a number of other restaurant concepts, all of which are open for Sunday brunch) choose to honor the old Puritanical law as opposed to embracing the new, drinker friendly rules. The bartender could not offer an explanation. In fact, he didn’t appear to know that the law had changed – he just quoted restaurant policy.

I find the fact that Joe’s would not embrace the law change baffling… In fact, after doing some googling on my iPhone while at the restaurant, I even found a quote from their corporate beverage guy stating his support for the proposed legislation and how good it would be for the restaurant industry. (Thankfully I’m a blogger and not a journalist, because for the life of me I cannot put my hands on that quote now – I was planning on siting it.)

It was bad enough that we couldn’t get a Bloody Mary, which was pretty much the entire reason that we went there, but things continued to get worse.

We placed our orders at approximately 11:05. I opt for eggs, sunny side up, with home fries, bacon and an English muffin. I get tomato juice instead of the Bloody Mary. Even though the Bloody Mary is included, the tomato juice is considered an even swap. Not so much in my book – one has vodka, the other does not have vodka. I think if the restaurant is going to have a policy, then perhaps my entrée should have had a slight price reduction or maybe they shouldn’t serve brunch until noon. I don’t think it would hurt business, because the place was pretty freaking empty.

Brunch includes a basket of “breakfast breads.” At around 11:30, the bartender brings us a loaf of their lunch bread, indicating that it “finally finished cooking.” You open for service at 11:00, but you can’t manage to have your bread ready for a half an hour? And not only that, it wasn’t even the bread that was supposed to go with my meal. (Don’t worry – during the wait, we were able to enjoy some cartoons and an exercise DVD infomercial on the two TVs over the bar. Perfectly appropriate bar viewing. Does anyone else find it ironic that they won’t serve alcohol an hour early, but they will play children’s entertainment in the BAR?)

I ask the bartender if they still offer the breakfast breads. He says “you mean the mini muffins?” I’m paraphrasing a bit… he didn’t provide terrible service. Although, I wish that he could have perhaps told us that there was a delay in the bread rather than leaving us sitting there for a half hour. Long story short, we get a basket with some warm carrot cake muffins and some ice cold and dry corn muffins (couldn’t even eat the corn muffins – no amount of butter could save them).

Approximately five minutes later our meals came. So we ordered at 11:05, got bread at around 11:30, and got our meals at 11:35. And the place is still pretty empty. Thirty minutes to get eggs. At an empty restaurant.

And that’s not all.

I prefer my eggs with dry whites and runny yolks, which can be a difficult thing to achieve. So I will settle for a little bit of runniness with my whites (when what I should do is just order them over easy). I do not like to settle for eggs so runny that I have to scrape the raw whites off the cooked whites and move them to the side of my plate.

And for whatever reason, thirty minutes is apparently not enough time to get the bacon and English muffin ready at the same time as the eggs and home fries. Wait a second, correction…. I think the home fries were ready first since they were room temperature at best. The eggs were rushed, and apparently the bacon and English muffin were started after the eggs and home fries were plated.

The bacon gets brought out a minute later, and a minute after that my English muffin appears. Fortunately there was some butter with the lunch bread, otherwise I would not have been given any to butter my toast.

I’m very disappointed. Joe’s has gone up and down over the years, but their brunch was always something I could count on. I’m afraid there has been too many downs over the last several years, and B and I are finally crossing it off our list. A chain restaurant on route 9 in Framingham has gotta keep up – there’s way too much competition in the neighborhood, and those competitors just won a little bit more of our business.

Then again, maybe their brunch was always this disappointing and I’ve just been too drunk on those Bloody Marys to notice. Hmm.