Andrew T.
Yelp
Actually a lot of good stuff going on here, but a flaw pissed me off, so one star, since that's the only thing that seems to get peoples' attention. Business owner, if you read this and contact me to acknowledge my main complaint (avocado), I will be happy to delete/edit.
The good: new location at end of same strip mall has more outdoor seating and seems to be a regular hangout for people with dogs. And I like dogs. A lot. So that's kind-of a plus. Except for obnoxious people with dogs. More on that later. Man who took my order was fast and efficient and friendly and made me a very nice cappuccino. I was impressed by the cleanliness of the open kitchen and the way staff was bustling around. Also, it didn't seem like they have jacked up their pricing as much as other businesses, which is appreciated.
Negatives: watched a male staff member bring roll sandwich on plate up to leave on counter for pickup too fast; half of the sandwich rolled off plate and onto counter. He just grabbed it with his bare hands and put it back on the plate and served it. I guess this is not the worst thing that you might see happen in a kitchen behind the scenes, but I think the right thing to do would have been to serve the un-dropped half and re-make it and give the customer a new whole one. BUT WHAT REALLY PISSED ME OFF was I ordered the avocado toast, which is toast with cream cheese and avocado topped with green salad and two over-easy eggs. I ordered this because I will pay a restaurant money to serve me a beautiful avocado so I don't have to deal with buying them for home and having them be unripe/too ripe/etc. Basically the plate came out with the greens covering all the avocado so you can't really see the avocado unless you excavate it. I cut up the eggs (perfectly cooked) and in that process I did however notice some gross bad avocado and so I looked further under the greens and they served me quite a lot of bad black/dark over-ripe avocado. I wasn't in the mood for a confrontation so I just put the bad parts aside and ate the rest. The rest was pretty good but why serve a customer spoiled avocado ??? The plate would look a lot better if the greens were on the bottom.
They have a nice station in the front for sugar, condiments, ice water etc, but the ice water is dispensed by pushing glass against a lever. So anyone that goes up multiple times for water is pushing their dirty glass onto the same thing you're going to push your glass on. (Or anyone who drains the container filling up their giant water bottle, yes, I'm looking at you, Japanese tourist). So yeah, next time I guess I'll operate this by pressing it with a napkin so my glass rim doesn't touch it. I looked around for, but couldn't find, any public hand sanitizer, which would have been appreciated when my hands were feeling a little sticky.
Finally, there were the afore-mentioned dog people bringing their dogs into the restaurant as well, both to sit at tables and to order at the counter, which at first didn't bother me, but there was one indoor table with two dogs at it for a long time. One was a pretty medium-sized brown water dog or spaniel of some type. When they finally left, there was liquid all over the floor, like a huge puddle. I asked a neighbor if the dog had urinated there, and they said no, the woman had put down a water bowl and the water all spilled out of the bowl. Did she clean it up? No, she just high-tailed it out of there. So the next customer (with a baby stroller) had to walk through a big puddle on the floor. My conclusion was that due to idiot customers like that, perhaps dogs shouldn't be allowed inside and the staff should be a bit more strict about that.
