Grand Day Cafe (Facebook / @GrandDayCafe)
1284 W. Fifth Ave. (map it!)
Columbus, OH 43212
(614) 481-3363
Open daily 6:30a-3p
Accepts cash & credit/debit
Vegetarian/vegan/gluten free? Y/N/N
Kid-friendly? Y
Date of Visit: Monday, May 28, 2012 at 10:00 a.m.
IMPRESSIONS: I’ve had a number of readers and friends tell me to visit Grand Day. I hadn’t been in the location since it used to be a Rise and Dine (one of my earlier reviews, awwww…). Rise & Dine rebranded into Sunny Street Cafe, and this location was closed. I thought I heard somewhere that a manager of R&D had purchased the location and turned it into their cafe. Whatever happened, they maintained that quintessential feeling of the casual cafe. This type of restaurant – think First Watch, Sunny Street, even Scrambler Marie’s – is a steady go-to for breakfast, even if they aren’t terribly imaginative.
ATMOSPHERE: Like most casual cafes, Grand Day is decorated with soft wood accents, flowers, and lots of beige or pastel colors. I like to joke that First Watch looks a little like a Florida retirement community. And indeed, there is always that sense of the casual, comfortable, mid-morning breakfast about these places. When you enter Grand Day, there’s a small seating area for waiting customers. You usually need to sign in. There are two big seating banks to the right and left.
Straight ahead is a small counter and the entrance to the kitchen.
FOOD: Casual cafes usually do well with the kids. Case in point: our four-year-old’s pancakes with bacon. Nothing exceptional, but he seemed to like them.
My wife makes fun of me for taking pictures of my orange juice. I’ll stop.
My wife ordered the Eggs Blackstone. In case you didn’t know, a blackstone is essentially an eggs benedict but with grilled tomatoes and bacon (as opposed to a florentine, which has spinach). This version came with a slice of avocado and a side of hash browns. The overall dish was decent, but the pale little tomatoes were a little sad. Seriously, folks, let’s not serve tomatoes out of season.
Even since I first peeked at their menu online, I knew I wanted to order the Kentucky Hot Brown. I’ve had a real hot brown in Kentucky, so I wasn’t expecting this version to be perfectly authentic. I figured Grand Day’s version would be adapted to breakfast, which it was: Texas toast, sliced turkey, poached egg, bacon, coated in hollandaise. Side of hash browns, which were brown on the sides but a little underdone in the middle. Generally, I liked the dish – it’s hard not to like bacon, turkey, toast, and hollandaise – but it could have used a little more seasoning. Maybe more flavorful turkey, or a spicier hollandaise.
SERVICE: Our service was so-so. I think we visited on a particularly busy day, when they were trying to crowd in a lot of customers, and the servers were moving so fast that they missed little details here and there. We were initially seated at a table that was nearly in the middle of the waiting area. It began to feel like we were sitting in the waiting area or in the line to pay at the register. When a booth along the wall opened up, we asked to be moved there. We got our meals fairly quickly, but we experienced many of those moments went we couldn’t find our server and had to ask someone else to get little things: a drink, napkins, and a side dish.
OVERALL: As you can tell with some of the food and the service, we had an okay experience at Grand Day. I’ll grant that it was a holiday and the restaurant may have been working a little beyond capacity, but with food that’s again decent but nothing to write home about, I’ll keep it on the list of breakfast places in town, but not one that I’d go running back to.
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