"2010-12-05T00:00:00"^^ . . "0"^^ . "I love breakfast and I'm always in search of a good breakfast place, so I was excited when Skillets opened and I had a new place to try. The husband and I were channeling our inner Clark Griswold yesterday morning and getting ready to totally deck out our house for the holidays despite the cold weather yesterday morning. So it seemed like a good morning to eat a large \"stick to your ribs\" breakfast, and we decided to try Skillets.\n\nI think I've probably watched too many episodes of Kitchen Nightmares with Gordon Ramsay because I ended up channeling him rather than Clark Griswold (well I channeled Clark once I got back to my house and started decorating!). My first thought when I walked in was \"Gosh, who the heck decorated this place?\"\n\nIt was just. so. much. wood....really....I've seen less wood in the rain forest! There was wood beadboard paneling everywhere, wood benches, wood tables, wood chairs....the place desparately needed some fabric or some softscape to it. The lights were so bright and harsh, I could have done needlestitch in there. And then the decor just didn't seem to make sense. In the midst of all this wood, you had sparsely spaced decor of ceramic hens (which fit with the wood theme), and then ceramic fat chefs (which really doesn't fit in with a country theme), and the floor tiles were reminiscent of a Tuscan villa (which would fit with the ceramic fat chefs, but not the beadboard). Before even eating the food, I was just a little taken aback by the ambiance (or lack of it).\n\nThe food was okay, but definitely not healthy and nothing very memorable. The menu had too many choices, yet nothing really exciting. I went for a boring \"Potato Egger\" and my husband went for the \"Healthy Omelette\". The Potato Egger had their potato casserole with two eggs on top and two slices of thick cut bacon on top of that. The \"Healthy Omelette\" seemed decidedly unhealthy even when compared to the carbfest that the Potato Egger was. It was a huge sized omelette (seemed like 3 or 4 eggs), maybe it was made with eggbeaters, but it was served with a huge portion of the potato casserole and bread. I think the only think healthy about it was that it had veggies inside. The potatoes are like a potato casserole (similar to Cracker Barrel), with cheese. Not my personal favorite when it comes to breakfast potatoes - I'm a purist - I like to actually taste potato moreso than cheese and mush.\n\nOverall, the food was not bad, but nothing exciting either. The service was friendly, but very slow considering it was 8 am on a Saturday morning and there were about 4 staff members for each customer at that point. A couple of highlights:\n *I drink hot tea and they serve Tazo tea standard rather than the cheap foodservice brand, and the teapot they provide is rather large, so that you don't need to ask for more hot water every 10 minutes.\n *I had a cranberry scone that was pretty tasty - it was sourdough and cranberries with big flakes of crystallized sugar on the top."^^ . . . "0"^^ . "0"^^ . "3"^^ .