Allô mon Coco

Cynthia

3.0

A friend & I went to eat brunch there. I ordered the Special with 2 eggs (poached), bacon, sausages, ham & a banana pancake which I asked to be changed for blueberry (which they told me cost $1 extra). Friend ordered the Grilled Veggies casserole with scrambled eggs. I got the cubed potatoes & she got the half-pureed ones.

The place was beautiful & large, but if I have one complaint, it's that the person who seated us didn't ask where we wanted to be seated despite the place being largely empty at the time of our arrival. We moved ourselves to a quieter spot & let the waiters know.

Service was fine: the food arrived within 30 minutes of ordering & our main waiter was very friendly & accommodating, able to speak both French & English. One thing though is it's not consistent: several waiters came to speak to us so we were never sure who to ask for something as simple as a coffee refill. On that topic, I asked twice for a coffee refill & finally had to get up & ask someone to literally pour it in my cup to get it. In short, only our primary waiter was reliable.

The food was a bit on the ridiculous side: each meal is clearly supposed to be for a single person but everything is doubled to exaggerated proportions:
- The pancake was not only oversized in terms of width, but also thickness, to the point of not being very good because it was far too doughy. & though I asked for a blueberry pancake, the blueberries looked as though they'd simply been smashed in the middle of the pancake, there was no real blueberry taste. There was also no syrup at our table.
- The two pieces of bacon that came with my dish, apart from being oversized, also lacked a bit in crispness.
- For some reason, they seem to believe that ordering two eggs means they should come with two very thick slices of toast, each cut in half.
- Contrary to what's shown in the picture for this dish, the amount of cubed potatoes you get is excessively disproportionate to the rest of your dish. My dish arrived with the equivalent of a whole cup of potatoes & I could only finish a third of this rather enormous portion.

The sausages were a decent size but far too soft on the inside, not a good texture for a proper sausage at all. The ham was nothing special either, not very tasteful. The beans were not too bad but I would not recommend the creton (pork) as the taste & texture were not much different from canned tuna or chicken & definitely not as good as a proper pâté.

The eggs were good, as were our fruit (mine being decorative) & my friend's veggies. Ironically enough, my decorative fruit was actually the better part of my meal. The free coffee refills saved this meal for me as everything was generally too thick & too much & it made me constantly thirsty. Each of these meals is made for two people: I had to take a doggy bag for the remainder of my potatoes & my friend could also barely finish her meal. It's simply too much food for one person, & not the best quality for most of it.