Chowing Down at the Village Inn

I’m a fan of places that serve breakfast all day (BAD–but in a good way). If I can get a waffle whenever I want it from your establishment, I’m biased in your favor before I’ve even sat down. There’s just something about the fare at BAD diners that’s hearty and comforting in its stick-to-your-ribs simplicity.

The Village Inn is a chain that has locations in the Rockies, the Midwest, Arizona, and Florida. Much of their menu is comprised of exactly what you’d expect from a restaurant of its calliber: eggs any way, pancakes, hamburgers, chicken fried steak…. Their stand-out offering is something they call a skillet, which, not surprisingly, comes to the table on a cast aluminum sizzler skillet (the same sort of dish you’d expect your fajita meat to come on at the Tex-Mex chain). It’s like breakfast and lunch all rolled into one menu item: perhaps the best chain diner brunch offering I’ve ever seen.

The Village Inn builds these treats on a foundation of fried, diced potatoes (kind of like cubical french fries). Then, they add some combination of hearty fare, top it off with a couple of eggs (and quite often some cheese), and serve it with a side of pancakes. The menu tells you that the eggs are scrambled, but in reality you can get them any way you want. I recommend over-easy, so you get some runny yolk to mix in with everything else; but you might prefer something different.

I got the portabella chicken skillet, which is surprisingly sophisticated for the venue it’s in. Strips of chicken breast are sauteed with portabella mushrooms, red peppers, and spinach; everything is topped off with hollandaise sauce (hollandaise at a BAD diner!). The combination of ingredients is nothing new; the Village Inn wouldn’t be serving it if it hadn’t been done many times before and thus have corporate expectation of widespread acceptance of the formerly-yuppie fungus as part of their menu. But the reason it’s been done so many times before is that it works—especially with the potatoes, which really brought everything together in the texture department.

Aurora got the San Diego skillet, which came with several mini-tacos shingled across the country potatoes. They were nothing spectacular: some sort of spiced chicken paste kind of thing inside a corn tortilla shell. I suspect that the tacos arrive at the Village Inn assembled and frozen and are heated to order, but I have no proof of that. I thought her skillet worked less well as a cohesive unit, but she enjoyed the tacos and the potatoes, even if she ate them separately.

The pancakes were tasty. I polished off my stack and Aurora’s. They came with imitation maple syrup, but what more can you expect when you’re paying $7.50 for the whole shebang.

The service at breakfast was spectacularly bad. Our waitress (who only had two other tables at the time) never came to take our order. We were trying to catch the manager’s attention to let her know we were hungry and being ignored when the waitress from the adjoining secction came over and told us she’d take our order even though we weren’t her table, which I thought was nice of her. Our waitress (who showed up halfway through the process) disagreed and had a bit of an exchange with the other waitress over by the busing station when they left our table. She then proceeded to make up by her early incompetence by not bringing pancakes to go with one of our party’s skillet. She apologized for the oversight, returned to our table to let us know the pancakes would be right out, and never came back after that. I have a tough time blaming such individual incompetence on the establishment; we just had a shitty waitress.

When I went back at 2:00 this morning for some pie and some decaf, I was pleasantly surprised to find that you’ve got an option of half or whole slices. I got a half slice each of coconut cream and key lime.

The only reason I ordered the coconut cream is that Eat-n-Park has a phenomenal coconut cream pie; and seeing as the two establishments fall into the same category, I wanted some means by which to make a direct comparison. In the pie department, it’s not even close—Eat-n-Park blows the Village Inn out of the water. Whereas Eat-n-Park does an actual meringue topping for their pies, Village Inn has some sort of an unidentifiable whipped something or other that lacks in both texture and flavor. This same complaint carries over to the key lime pie, which had decent flavor to its lime portion, but as a whole lacked the class and grace of a properly-topped pie. The service for my late night visit, it’s worth noting, was good.

Ratings:
Brunch—4 Oranges
Dessert—2 Oranges

One Response to “Chowing Down at the Village Inn”

  1. Bill Says:

    Where is this Village Inn?

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