Asians gone bad

We were up in Lion's Head this morning breakfasting at Marydales. The FM had a breakfast wrap and I had the "really hungry" breakfast special, meaning three eggs and you don't have to choose between ham, bacon, and sausages; you get all of them!

We like to take the back road up, the one that goes through Barrow Bay. Just south of there we encountered a gaggle of trials bikers. That's a peculiar sort of motorcycle racing in which the objective seems to be to stand on the pegs and go as slow as you can. I was tempted to stop and ask a few questions, but I was hungry.

Breakfast was great, except for the crappy deep-fried potato cubes, but the dogs like them, so it's more or less a wash. But what really got our attention was the extended Asian family that had commandeered the middle of the room; four adults and a gang of nine or ten brats ranging in age from maybe three to about ten.

While I don't like to indulge stereotypes, my experience with Asian families is that their kids are generally well-behaved. Not this lot! The little hooligans were running about the place with the obnoxious precociousness one typically associates with spoiled middle-class white kids.

Then we figured out the problem. One of the adults was not like the others - he was a white dude. For the duration of our visit he never once took his eyes off his phone. He was oblivious to the mayhem around him. He never interacted with anyone. He ate with one hand while holding his phone in the other.

Obviously, one of the women in that extended family had made a terrible mistake. Now the entire clan is threatened by cultural assimilation. Let's just hope they come to their senses. Someday they may just leave phone dude in a restaurant somewhere and go home without him.

He won't notice, and they'll be the better for it.

What makes a good restaurant breakfast?

Anybody can fry up some ham or bacon or sausages.

That's not what makes a good breakfast.

And believe it or not, it ain't the eggs either.

Mind you, there is a level of skill that I don't have that's essential to doing eggs over-easy.

Me personally, I can do eggs sunny side up. Once I try for over easy... well, that's generally where I decide to go for an omelette instead.

Flipping those eggs over on the grill is an art.

But any greasy spoon everywhere has found a minimum wage cook who can flip those eggs without breaking them. Which is why we like to have breakfast out.

What really makes or breaks a breakfast is the quality of the potatoes.

Those deep-fried potato cubes aren't fucking breakfast potatoes, OK? That's just crap!

We were shocked to be served those with our breakfast at the Green Door the other day.

Now to be fair, the server actually spilled flat out that they're not doing breakfast.

So why are you open for breakfast hours? They used to do breakfast, and they used to have real fried-on-the-stove-top potatoes on offer as part of it, as befits their stellar rep.

But now they don't have breakfast but they're open at breakfasty hours, and they've got a couple of breakfasty things on the menu, but they come with DEEP FRIED FROZEN POTATO CUBES!

No way!

The Top Notch still offers up real potatoes, but the last few times we've breakfasted there, they've been undercooked. That's almost worse than those faux fries masquerading as fried potatoes.

So today we ventured all the way up to Lion's Head for breakfast. Real fried potatoes! Properly cooked!

Trust me, it's worth the drive to the MaryDale restaurant. And now that the tourists are gone home, it's not even crowded.