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| - Ah, there's nothing worse than crushing disappointment on a Sunday morning. Well, maybe I'm being a wee bit melodramatic, but when I'm famished I tend to get cranky. Joe's Diner is a hop skip and a jump away from our house and I've been driving past it for months thinking "hmm... wonder if that place is any good" . So this morning, in what I thought at the time to be a flash of brilliance, I looked up Joe's Diner on Yelp (which very rarely leads me astray) and to my delight this neighborhood establishment had a 4 star average. Not too shabby, and certainly worth a shot, right?! WRONG. We walked in and it was busy (expected on a Sunday morning) and we were quoted a 10-15 minute wait. Fair enough. But it was absolutely swelteringly hot and humid inside (swamp cooler maybe?!) and smelled funny (raw eggs left out?). Still, we waited-- there had to be a good reason this place got 4 stars. As promised, in about 12 minutes, the hostess lead us to the back seating area, but not to a table, and then just left us there standing, bewildered. A few minutes later, another employee saw us there looking lost and hastily wiped off a nearby table and told us we could sit down. Once seated, we were surrounded by tables of screaming children (not the establishment's fault by any means, but definitely did not improve our experience). As we sat for 15 minutes, without so much as a glance from any of the servers, we soaked in the sweaty, stinky, dirty (did I mention the floors were filthy?), loud atmosphere. It appeared there was no hope of acknowledgement by a server, much less a glass of water or a desperately needed cup of coffee, so we threw in the towel. We stood up and walked out, defeated, hungry, non-caffinated, sweaty and disappointed, again without so much as a glance from any of the staff.
I want to believe that this was just an unusually bad day, maybe because it was a busy Sunday, maybe because the stars weren't aligned, who knows... and that Joe's Diner really does deserve it's 4 stars. I'd love to have a decent (if not awesome) locally owned breakfast establishment nearby, but I don't know if Joe's is that place. Will we be back to give it another go? Maybe, only if we're feeling optimistic, patient, cool, and pre-cafinated.
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