GUEST POST--TOAST IS TOAST WITH ANDRE AND CINDY

Today's guest post is from local aesthete and man of arts and letters, Andre Prudhomme.

Thoughts of grand breakfasts swam through our heads as the night of December 1st drew to a close—I had taken a dear friend to Flint to pick up a quantity of good drywall, and neglecting dinner, found myself very hungry by the end of the night. Luckily I’d been able to furnish my insides with a thick morass of stout, but Cindy hadn’t the option to supplement solid food for good beer, so she took to pretzel rods, and we lumbered through the night. Needless to say, upon waking we found ourselves extremely famished.

“Breakfast. Where do you wanna go?”

“Well, it’s either Toast or Sam’s,” Cindy sighed.

We have our regular haunts, but rising after noon, those certain standbys were cut in half. So we found ourselves not thinking too hard, and with these two options.

“Let’s go to Sam's,” Cindy suggested, “You’re hungry, it’d be good.”

“Maybe... No, let’s go to Toast, the coffee...” Coffee is such an intimate part of the morning, and truthfully, the coffee at Sam's is not to standard. Toast became the victor.

As usual, when arriving at Toast, we found the back parking lot to be populated by cars belonging to aloof assholes; their haphazard idea of parking left little room for our little vehicle. Scuttling through the causeway I noticed a sign on the door of the adjacent restaurant giving hours, 4-9 PM, Friday and Saturday. I thought aloud, “My, that place must be fantastic!” Luckily the restaurant held only lunchgoers and not the usual hungover elites in for their weekly shovelful of “The Cure.”

It being a Wednesday we were able to seat ourselves and chose a table under a newly decorated wall, adorned with what must be the Christmas refuse of Anna’s Coffee Shop (God bless her).

We promptly ordered water and coffee and settled in with the menus, I determined to stray from the bacon and gouda omelet, my usual.

As quickly as we received our beverages Cindy commented, “This is going to be a while.”

Already she observed (what I later deduced) to be the waiter, and then a second man in the kitchen, operating the grill and dishwashing duties, taking on even the third task of bussing. The duo was operating the entire establishment.
Of course there was a table of demanding old ladies gumming up the works, so this meager staff (surely determined by some colleague’s “illness”) were already sinking into what seemed a maelstrom of gigantic proportions.

Our server was finally able to make it back for our order (and refill the coffee); Cindy deciding on oatmeal with a side of sausage and I choosing the Farmer’s Omelet, not a profound choice, but a great morning standby. Seeing as it had been nearly 24 hours since I’d eaten, I longed for the gluttonous portion.

As always Cindy was correct in her prediction—we talked of the week’s events, orated wild tales for our salt and pepper shakers (small bears in aprons), and waited for our order.

Finally the hustling server delivered a bowl of grey matter which Cindy immediately deemed “Soupy”; I with my lifelong abstinence of oatmeal couldn’t tell, but the porridge looked awfully drab and tasteless.

More revolting to me was the plateful of breakfast I received: the home fries appeared to be mutated raisins mixed with fried cheese and possibly pancake batter, accompanied by a pile of eggs and sausage lumps. A Farmer’s Omelet houses sausage, green peppers, onions, potatoes, and American cheese—this pile exhibited some vegetable pieces probably frozen around last Christmas (resurrected for this meal) with a portion of cheese lodged at the south end of the omelet, and uncertain trunks of sausage scattered about. As on the side, the potatoes exhibited a small, wrinkled appearance. However, in the omelet these tuberous pieces were at least edible, being soaked in the watery, half cooked egg like brine, which poorly housed this collage.

As soon as I saw that white runoff of the eggs I became appalled, pouring some obscenity across the table and cursing the very nook I had chosen for our repast. The gruel and sausages seemed to appease Cindy, though satisfaction certainly didn’t emanate from her side of the table. I struggled through, leaving a plate of withered potatoes astride a soupy remainder, and a sad side of dry rye on a small plate by the coffee. Yes, as lame as it is, even the toast was subpar.