Blondie's Cafe

Blondie's Cafe

St. Paul, MN

Reviewed July 25th, 2005

Why do I hate upscale dining? Because you have to do things their way - the snob way - or not at all. Their way might be more sophisticated, healthier, wealthier and wiser but sometimes you just want your way, because your way is more comfortable, oh and you're paying them. At Blondie's, a newly opened little breakfast and lunch joint on Snelling, I was sure I could end my eternal quest for hashbrowns and fried eggs made with love and butter or at least margarine, crisp bacon too. everywhere else I've gone (including some diners that have won awards for their breakfasts like Key's Cafe and the St. Clair Broiler) cannot even manage to cook a decent egg and some hashbrowns with butter. When I dined at these places and I saw the awards hanging in plaques on the wall and I looked down at the undercooked eggs on my plate, the oily, meager portion of hashbrowns that were burnt on the outside and not even done in the middle, the limp bacon - when I saw that the toast was by far the best thing on my plate, friends, I wept bitter tears for I knew that I was witnessing the Death of the American Breakfast.

Then I discovered Edie's, a diner in southern Minnesota that offers dinner plate sized portions of perfect hashbrowns, eggs, bacon and toast and tall glasses of fresh squeezed juice all for a fair price. It seemed I had found paradise after all, but unfortunately Edie's is in southern Minnesota, has extremely limited hours (it is family run) and a waiter who hates his job and picks and wipes large, gelatinous boogers all over himself and scrapes off his eczema while serving customers. Anyway one would have to drive all night from St. Paul to get there in time. I'm trying to talk the airport into doing emergency helicopter breakfast commutes to Edie's from the Twin Cities for free (charity work) but the stingy bastards won't donate any flight time and Edie's STILL doesn't have a helipad!

How disappointing then, how shamefully disappointing to find that at Blondie's, the little cafe that everybody else seems to be hyping and fawning over to the nth degree, is totally overrated. When I asked for fried eggs at 11:00 A.M. they told me they didn't do breakfast that late, then changed their minds and said they could give me cheesy, garlic eggs or quiche. I said, "you can't do fried eggs?" and they looked at me like I was something the golden retriever swallowed and then regurgitated and then eat again. "We're not short order cooks," one of the scrawny girls replied, insulted. "We don't have the staff for that." Have the staff? They can do quiche or fancy cheesy eggs but they don't have "the staff" to do a simple fried egg or hashbrowns? Gimmie a break. They should have just told the truth and said they were more interested in lording their superior taste over customers than actually satisfying their simple requests. I could have respected that answer, even if its not quite what I want to hear. Funny thing is that their menu carries a disclaimer that they will try to accommodate special requests or substitutions. Apparently, that only means snobbish requests. Maybe if I requested a fried egg with fresh king crab crumbles, and smoked Alaskan salmon souffle with lemon zest with hand picked cranberry almond truffle sauce then I could have gotten somewhere. Instead I came for fried eggs, and I ended up eating wild rice chicken salad - which was damn good, but not at all what I needed.

Never the less, in spite of the cold service and inflexible, uppity attitude a sense of professionalism forces me to give the place high marks for atmosphere and decor. The al fresco option was available in the form of a beautiful, rough hewn wooden deck - a feature not nearly common enough in the area. I am able to report that this attention to detail also extends to the two gender specific, single entry lavatories. Mellow green walls, soft lighting, paper towels dispensed from the sort of peasant style metal bucket one might find a Pier One Imports, which rested on a wood table rather than nailed to the wall. It looked almost as if an interior decorator had had their way with the place. I could nearly imagine a manic Kirstie Alley jumping out of the bucket to give me a lecture about Scientology, but I chose not to because the Dark Side can be very powerful. In short, I will briefly pontificate in stating my belief that the bathroom is the place in which to force one's sense of upper class superiority on others, not the breakfast table.

Friends, lets have a moment of silence for the Death of the American Breakfast. The American Breakfast was full of cholesterol; it killed you if you ate it too often, but shit so does motor oil or lead paint or anything else. The American Breakfast was hearty in the best sense of the back slapping, lumberjacking, overall snapping, crop planting, church snubbing American tradition. It included all the essentials: fresh squeezed orange juice, coffee brought straight from the donkey's saddle bags and the chapped hands of friendly Juan Valdez who says, "take these beans, my good American friend from el Norte and create a world of wakefulness and attention paid, a world of thoughtful nods rather than sleepy yawns. Take the energy contained in these wee beans and use it to move the engines of your great industry and society. Spread freedom and democracy and terminate the heathens with a forceful blow to their golden calf and lord of lies. Fuel the innovations and creations of your ceaseless minds. Build us a world full of death robots and stem cells. Find the answers, solve the problems, map the genome and when you have finally finished changing the world, do not forget your humble, sombrero clad friends to the south and their small donkeys named Pedro (roll the R please). Remember your sisters and brothers who gave to you the small brown bean, as well as the cocaine freebase and the marijuana that help you relax and giggle through bad movies. Vaya con dios, my beloved American suit wearing monkey!" Take this coffee and add a glass of sparkling, mountain fed spring water straight from the rocky bosom of mother earth and add to it crisp bacon and hashbrowns grated from real Idaho or Yukon Gold potatoes grown in the fertile alluvial topsoil of the west and fried just to the color of a summer sunrise in the butter of the blessed peace loving moo cow, and fried eggs too, oh those gelatinous globby cholesterol sacks that could have become baby birds, along with multi-grain toast made from wheat sown, grown, scythed, reaped and milled in the Midwest by proud, barefoot farmers, in the great breadbasket of the great plains of a great nation. Then let the Hand of Providence reach down and firmly grasp the wicker handles of this massive breadbasket, gracefully negotiating its hugosity and spreading its fruits to the rest of the nation, the earth and the astronauts way upstairs in the cold altitudes of their ceaseless orbits, blasting out said fruits through a horn of plenty to put the puritan pilgrim's pride to shame! Hark, hark! The American Breakfast is dead.

Who killed it? The Daughters and Sons of Progress and the Grand Killa of Tender Mercies, esq. They killed it with their synthetic oil sprays and slavery to efficiency and convenience. They killed it with their pride, with their sleepless droves of bah-ing customer clones upon whom they foisted mercilessly their lowered standards. The American Breakfast begged for its life, stating, "I am the carbo-caloric voice of your freedom. Can you secure the blessings of your liberty on an empty stomach? Woe to the fool that doth take the low road of the Perkin's or the ember's or the Happy Chef. The Happy Chef be not a chef at all, but a straight up playa' hatin' playa. Hats off, eyes lowered and heads down in shame. Shame I said! No, you didn't wet the bed. No, nobody caught you in the act of abject, wanton self abuse while watching the View. Its much worse than that, much worse: The American Breakfast is dead, and we all have a hand that touched the knife which broke its yoke.

- Justin Teerlinck

RESTROOM RATING: 9
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