Oh NO. :( This place has changed hands and the new owners, I'm sad to say, have changed a lot of things for the negative, and so it's with a very sad heart I must update my review and lower it to two stars.
We were so excited to be going thru Dayton again so we could stop here for breakfast. The last time we came it was so clean and neat and the food was delicious. Imagine our dismay, then, upon entering to have our noses assaulted with a horrible foul smell of rancid grease. It was so thick and obnoxious that I wanted to back out right away! The next thing we noticed was how unkempt and untidy the restaurant had become. We instantly were concerned that RR had changed hands.
Service was uncharacteristically slow. The waitress was nice, but was also alternately trying to do that "isn't it funny that I'm so ornery" thing and it was NOT working. She should just stick to being nice.
The menu was not as we remembered; the prices certainly weren't, that's for sure! They'd gone up quite a bit. Since we were starving, we struggled to ignore the horrible smell and the bad vibes we were getting and ordered a breakfast burrito and a chile verde omelet. It took a long time for the food to be prepared. When it came out, upon initial inspection the plates held good portion sizes, and nothing was burned, so we dug in. But sadly, that first bite let us know this was not the same fantastic RR Cafe we knew and loved!
The omelet was tough and the filing was not house made. It was a canned chili verde, and a bad one at that. It tasted like metal and the meat was gray and gross. What was worse was the omelet itself had a lot of broken egg shells in it - it was horrible, and we could not finish it. The potatoes kind of looked like the same ones, but now they tasted off, like perhaps the grease used to cook them was old or something. That would explain the rancid smell we were being subjected to. The potatoes, too, went uneaten.
The breakfast burrito was a large flour tortilla containing plain chunks of a very gristly ham, overcooked scrambled eggs and something that appeared to be very overcooked green pepper. No wonder our food had taken so long to come out - the line cook had been busy overcooking absolutely everything. The burrito was very bland and plain. And I love cheese, I really do, but when I saw all that cheese just unceremoniously glooped on the top with nothing else to leaven all that orange (no sprinkle of green? no bits of fresh tomato? nothing?) well, it just wasn't appetizing to me. But as I couldn't eat the inside of the burrito, I just ate some of the outside with the cheese. Which was boring. So I added some of the salsa provided on the side but that actually made it worse: since it was crappy canned salsa, now it really tasted like I was struggling to eat a cheaply made quesadilla. So I gave up.
The waitress came over, saw our full plates, and asked if everything was alright. We explained there were eggshells in the omelet (that's all we said, I did not mention our great disappointment about everything else) and she said, "Oh". I did say the food tasted different, and asked her if the restaurant had new owners, and she said yes, it had been sold over 6 months before, and she pointed to a photo of the new owners on the wall. She then walked away and went to talk to a very large man standing in the back (he was the man in the photo, so I knew he was the new owner) and I heard her say "they found eggshells in their omelet" but he just shrugged and walked away. So she came back and said "here's your bill" and that was that.
Because the waitress tried to be nice, and because I have to admit, bad tasting or not, the food portions are large (even though the prices are now large, too) I'll give it two stars instead of one. But sadly, because things have so dramatically changed for the worse here, I just can't see myself ever going back.
What a shame. This used to be the only good place to eat breakfast in Dayton. Bummer. read more