| rev:text
| - I usually don't review places that I have only been to once, but I had such a bizarrely mixed experience at Nami that I just had to speak up.
We decided on Nami after reading great reviews of brunch on Yelp.
I hate it when you walk into a restaurant and it isn't immediately obvious what you're supposed to do: sit down? Wait to be seated? Order at the counter? Well this was one of those places, so we did what everyone else was doing and got on line at the counter.
There was almost no evidence of a brunch. No one was eating brunch. The kitchen didn't look big enough to produce brunch foods. There were no obvious brunch menus. Just one hand lettered sign about a brunch special. My husband wanted to walk out, but I said no, I saw the brunch on their website, lets wait and see what they say.
So we finally get to the front of the line and ask about brunch. The girl at the counter says "yes, we are serving brunch, there should be some menus on the tables." And she sends us over to the seating area.
We went and found menus on one of the tables and realized there was no table service. We got BACK on the line, which was now pretty long. We waited. I ordered and paid. Tables were filling up quick. We got the last two-top in the small dining room. Whew.
As soon as we sat down, I realized I was so flustered from the menu experience that I'd forgotten to order a side of sage sausage hash. So I got back on line AGAIN. I noticed another waitress handing brunch menus to the people behind me in line. Which really, really annoyed me. Right after that I learned that the young lady who originally helped us was a trainee, which explains the menu fiasco, but doesn't excuse her lack of common sense.
By the time I finished ordering again and paying again, I had just enough time to grab two free cups of citrus infused water and get back to our table before the food came out. Wow, quick! Except that we only got one of the two coffees we ordered, and it was in a to-go cup (why? Aren't you guys trying to keep stuff out of landfills?)
So here is the good part of my review. The food was really interesting. We ordered huevos rancheros and chilaquiles. The tofu scramble was one of the best I've had. The chilaquiles were a unique presentation in the form of a "cake", kind of like a mille-feuilles pastry. The posole was addictively good. And when we finally got the sage sausage "hashsheesh", it too was vibrantly flavorful. My only complaint with the food is that a few items were kind of dry (chilaquiles, hash) and could have used more of the sauce, sour cream, etc. that came with them.
My long-awaited coffee arrived scaldingly hot, with unpleasant looking curdled soymilk floating in it. I remember having curdling issues with soymilk and hot coffee when I first went vegan back in the 1980s, but it hasn't happened to me in a long time. Meanwhile, my husband's coffee with soymilk was just fine. So I asked one of the waitresses if it was "normal" and after some discussion of how it should go away if I stirred it (it didn't), she offered to bring another one with steamed soymilk. Kind of a surprise after being sent to get my own menu and losing my place in line, but I wasn't complaining!
My husband ordered another entree, because he is shameless, so we got to experience the Benedict Arnold, which came along with my new coffee. Again in a takeout cup? (Why? I don't know why!) More surprisingly vivid flavors from the Canadian bacon and the vegan hollandaise sauce, which was on the thin side but very tasty. And this time, HE got to wait in line to order and pay (folks, if you're counting, that's four waits in line just to have brunch.)
By the time we finished the last bite of tofu scramble, my coffee was still undrinkably hot and we were not at all in a mood to wait on line a fifth time for a pastry or a tsoynami to go.
So there you go: a mixed review. Very good food, but in an atmosphere that made me feel uncomfortable and stressed instead of relaxed and happy. Pretty much the opposite of the "mini-celebration" brunch experience described on the website. If Nami switched to table service and one bill at the end instead of counter service, I would be there every weekend (if I lived in Phoenix...)
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