Today it was Myra's birthday. Normally we would have jetted off to a fun Asian place for lunch, but Myra and Actual had an important call during lunching hours so we decided to make it birthday breakfast instead. We all decided to head out to the Original Pancake House. Although true OPH snobs will tell you that the only two good OPH locations are the original in Portland and the branch in Las Vegas, I've been to at least 6 and they've all been good.
This morning also provided an opportunity to once again see if my Boss would be hit with his Breakfast Curse. My boss Brian LOVES breakfast. For some reason, every time we head out to breakfast something strange happens. There's always at least one food item that comes in a strange format that's completely nonstandard or just plain strange. Even though it keeps happening to him, it's completely not his fault. Brian always orders very standard breakfast fare, unlike me. Would Brian's breakfast have some strangeness to it? Stay tuned.
The first thing to the table was a Dutch Baby ordered for everyone. This is a crepe like pancake that has been allowed to puff up in the oven then settle down into a tasty deflated form. It's extremely moist and eggy on the inside.
Generous amounts of lemon wedges and butter are provided to prep the Dutch Baby for consumption. No syrup is necessary on this one!
This is Work Girlfriend's portion. Yes, it's really as good as it looks.
Even the butter is awesome here. I assume it's whipped farm fresh AA.
Here's my entry into the breakfast race. Corned beef hash topped with two eggs poached easy. Hollandaise on the side. This was supremely good. It says a lot about how good their poached eggs are that I got them instead of fried eggs. The eggs at OPH are fried in clarified butter. Seriously folks, that's hard to turn down.
This is a spinach, feta cheese and sundried tomato omelette. These things are huge. Definitely not a three-egg omelette. I'm thinking they must use a half dozen at least.
Ham and cheese omelette. Similar size to the other one.
Work Girlfriend decided to spring for the Eggs Michael. Think eggs benedict, but swap the canadian bacon for sausage, then instead of hollandaise use mushroom gravy. It's amazingly good.
Actual's blueberry pancakes topped with blueberry compote.
So, you must be wondering: how did Brian's breakfast turn out?
It started with his usual order of a large chocolate milk. More than one place has messed this up before. One diner we were at once brought him his drink with chocolate syrup dripping all over the outside of the glass. Yet another place we ate at brought him not chocolate milk, but COLD HOT COCOA with whipped cream on it. His chocolate milk was thankfully actually chocolate milk. The thing pictured below is their large. The salt shaker next to it for size comparison is only an inch high, so you can get the scale of how small their large is. We saw their "small" and it looked like a double wide shot glass.
And then there was his breakfast entree. He got a ham and cheese scramble. Now, note that this is the after picture and not the before picture. Let me show it to you and then we'll discuss it a bit.
First of all, they put waaaaaaaay too much cheddar cheese on his scramble. That pile in the bottom right is ALL cheese except for the little piece of egg in the foreground. This is just the cheese that he pushed off the top of his scramble when he got it... there was a lot more that he actually ate. This was about 3x the amount of cheese any sane chef would have put on this dish.
And then there was the ham.
Near the end of the meal, Brian was giving his plate a strange look. He told me that the ham tasted strange, but he didn't know what the problem was. Myra tried it and made a strange face then told me to try it. I figured it out right away. The ham that they were using was hickory smoked. Now this was weird to begin with for two reasons: 1) using a smoked ham in this kind of dish is definitely not standard, 2) hickory smoke is sort of an odd choice for ham. But it went beyond that. The amount of hickory smoke (or liquid smoke) that was applied to this ham was on the level of gas station beef jerky. It was that strong. The aftertaste of the ham was seriously almost identical to a hickory flavored beef jerky. How very strange.
If any of you have breakfast suggestions in the Roseville, CA, please let me know. I need a place that won't do strange things to my Boss' breakfast!
