Located on West Grey in that edge of Montrose to Midtown transition zone with a decent parking lot (not to be a size queen but Byzantio's was bigger) as an actual dine-in joint it is an easy decision to make for breakfast before or after a trip down to the courthouse.
The breakfast special has several different iterations depending on whether you prefer pancakes, freedom toast, or a goyim bagel. As one of the chosen people I would not trust the bagel at a place like this - there is not one of my people in sight in the kitchen with their sensible chest hair poking out from behind a soaked mostly unbuttoned shirt with a silver Star of David necklace - but everything else at a diner is fair game and does not require hardy shtetl genes to sufficiently prepare.
I do not often eat breakfast during breakfast hours; brinner is the life for me. However at normal breakfast hours early in the morning this place was not super busy so it was pretty casual and refreshing to dine in at an old timey diner where most things move slow and are pleasant. The entire restaurant, both inside and outside patio, had one waitress working the entire thing. It took quite some time to get some coffee but that is fine, she had other things to do.
The food came out insanely fast after we ordered which always bothers me more than slightly. I know they didn't go in the back and slaughter this food and cook it in under three minutes. So it was either pre-prepared and sitting there for the next asshole to walk in and order this dish exactly, or even worse it was prepared for someone else who had a hissy fit and walked out, so it was already made and just transferred to me as a hapless victim of circumstance.
Food should take some time to cook, prepare, plate, and be sufficiently mired by the gentlesir that prepared it because this is his baby, he made this, and gave this life. Even if this came out of a supermarket package and was just heated up in the microwave still give me the illusion that this was made fresh just for lil' old me. I mean, it took significantly less time for the food to come out than it did to even get a first cup of coffee so that tells you something about how this was WAY 2 QUICK.
Allow more than three minutes to pass between ordering and delivering food so we can all live that lie, like we are a 1950s Leave It To Beaver married couple both sleeping with the pool boy (separately, not together) but we pretend like we're not because we're not monsters and we don't want to shatter the illusion of normalcy to our neighbors and our impressionable children who will grow up, work for Wall Street, and destroy the world's economy just to make an extra shiny nickel for themselves that they can contribute to the Clintons.
The freedom toast was not remarkable, but serviceable for a roadside diner. It was definitely not the local high marks of challah freedom toast at the Canopy or Avalon Diner. The bacon was rock hard and shattered upon touching from a fork, like shatter (or a dab as the children call it) so I was not a fan of that at all. I like the juicy, sizzling, and seductive kind that you have to eat in secret and keep a stiff upper lip about around the tribe when they discuss how they never eat pork or pork products for some silly reason.
It is not meant to be fine dining, so it works as a roadside diner that is a comfy slice of Americana in the middle of the city which is more entertaining and whimsy than the Denny's or the ihap. read more