Mike and Music

Oops… this is an old post that somehow never got posted. Well, now you’ll have the chance to read about our AWFUL experience at Richard Walker’s Pancake House.

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We got a postcard in the mail a few weeks ago… Celebrating the grand opening of a restaurant that has been a breakfast favorite for fifty years.

If you’re confused as to why a restaurant that had been open for fifty years was having a grand opening… you’re not alone. The flyer wasn’t especially well-written. A little sluething (and some reading between the lines… if you read it over a few times, you could see what they were getting at) reveals that Richard Walker’s pancake house… a breakfast restaurant with not one, but TWO locations in Chicago — is expanding to a total of THREE locations — one right here in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter.

The postcard has a big picture of a gooey deep-fried-looking apple pancake on the front, with the text “Free Apple Pancake with coupon!”. On the rear, was a separate offer — buy one entree, get one free. Each offer was followed by an asterisk, and at the bottom was a standard disclaimer… “* Must present coupon”, or something to that effect.

Sunday Morning we rise from bed and wander the house for a bit. When the topic of breakfast comes up, we consider making breakfast (we’ve become a fan of Egg Beaters lately, and we have a stash of fake-sausage, too), but I remember the coupon (a veritable apple pancake goldmine!), and we get dressed and get in the car.

A quick driveby reveals a line probably 30 people long. We immediately consider going elsewhere, but we do want to try it (after all… fifty years!), so we park and get in line.

I will say the line moved quickly. On entering, the restaurant was (as all downtown commercial space seems to be) inhabited by 50% snobby rich pepole, and 50% desolate poor people. We saw a woman with three dogs who looked like she’d just smoked a kilo of crack (if they even sell crack by the kilo these days), rocking back and forth in her chair. And the insurance salesman in front of us couldn’t stop talking about how his kids went to school at U of I, and he had been wanting an Apple pancake since parents weekend ten years ago.

Our table was conveniently located in a hallway… Actually, the whole restaurant was set up as a hallway. Not much bigger than the average livingroom, but very well decorated… It fit in well in the gaslamp. The place was crawling with people, both diners and employees. Our server was over with coffee and water very quickly, and back to take our order shortly after that. (That is to say, he was expeditious. I hate waiting forever when I know what I want. I hate it especially bad at a place where they are known for only one thing, and it’s what everyone orders, and you have to sit there for five minutes so he can come back and say, “So… two apple pancakes?”… but I digress.) I ordered the trademark Apple Pancake (you can always count on me to have the house special), but Music delved from the norm with a short stack of chocolate chip pancakes and hash browns. The guy seemed sort of surprised I ordered the Apple Pancake, and warned me that it would be “8 to 10 minutes” before it would arrive. Hey, no sweat. Sometimes greatness takes eight minutes.

We read the Sunday paper on our little table. I drank my coffee and Music drank her H2O. Eight minutes go by, and right on schedule… my gooey apple pancake, and Music’s chocolate chip short stack.

I dig into my apple pancake (which is not only surrounded by brown sugar, but covered with it also), and take the first bite. The first thing that comes to mind is that my first bite is something close to the surface temperature of the sun. And covered with carmelized sugar. Ouch.

So, I blow it off, use some of the butter puddled around the edges to drown out the flames, and dive in again. The pancake is super, super-sweet. Then there is (literally) about 1/2 cup of brown sugar on top and around it. And somewhere deeeeeep inside are little slices of apple. It’s a good dessert… just that it’s a little sweet for breakfast.

Music’s experience is similar… her pancakes were good, but too sweet. (The hash browns were PERFECT!) We’d talked about whether or not we’d be back to this restaurant. We have a couple of regular breakfast hangouts, and I think we just like them better. They’re a little slower paced, which is how we like our Sunday mornings. We thought we might bring an out of town visitor to Richard Walker’s, but it wasn’t going to become the Sparky’s of breakfast.

Fast forward to paying our bill… Our expeditious service stopped with the arrival of our food. Though there was a kid making the rounds every two minutes with coffee, our waiter wasn’t to be seen at the table again. Efforts to flag him down

Nothing says romance like a vacuum, right? Most of the time, no, but when you’re Mike and I, a Roomba screams “I love you!”

Our house is old and has wood floors and dust seems to settle EVERYWHERE (actually, it doesn’t just settle, it gets married, has babies, and colonizes the entire place). On top of that, I shed like a cat with mange.

In the past (P.R., or pre-Roomba), we swept. A LOT. But the hair and dust and assorted other detritus just got stuck in the broom’s bristles. In essence, each time we swept, we were simply moving the mess from place to place.

The Roomba changed all of that. I was totally surprised when Mike said he’d gotten one. I’d wanted one for some time, but I’m cheap and didn’t want to spend the money on it. Fortunately, Mike trolls the internet for deals (not to mention the fact that he doesn’t mind spending his money on appliances and such. But that’s a whole other blog entry.).

The day the Roomba arrived was magical. The Roomba is small enough to fit under our bed and claw-foot bathtub, so it gets dust bunnies that in areas we rarely clean. It also has a remote control that allows us to drive it from room to room. That’s not the coolest part, though.

You don’t have to do anything with the Roomba, just turn it on. It goes by itself. The Roomba moves from room to room, vacuuming up hair and dust, gently bumping against objects like furniture and walls. This is where the amazing thing about the Roomba comes in– the amazing thing being its brilliant little robot mind.

As the Roomba bumps into things, it makes notes in its computer brain. The Roomba thinks to itself, “Oh, there’s something here. Remember that in the future.” And so it does. In time, as the Roomba gets to know your house, it knows where objects are and learns to avoid them. That allows the machine to clean the areas that it can access and stay away from stuff that doesn’t need to be vacuumed (like the legs of our computer desk).

The other fabulous thing about the Roomba is that it once it’s done using its little robot brain to plot its course around the house (cleaning the entire time, mind you), it calmly makes its way back to the base. That’s right, folks, the robot vacuum goes back to its bases, hops on the charger, and turns off automatically. How cool is that?!?

So now, every few days or so, before leaving the house, one of us will start the Roomba. We leave to do our thing, it does its thing, and when we get home, the floors are free of debris.

Who could ask for anything more?