European American Bakery Cafe

The European American's cookies and breakfasts are delicious. Their waitstaff are overstretched and their cash-register people, who are maybe also waitstaff when not behind the counter, are slow, friendly, and confused. Which means that when we went to eat breakfast, we were sitting more than ten minutes before we got a menu (there were six other parties in there having breakfast when we came in). My impression was that people who go to the seating booths to the right as you enter get their menus faster, in case you want to test the theory. The waitress was friendly when she could get to us, and the food was out promptly, and she even brought us water and refilled the coffee: full points for attentiveness after the initial waiting period.

Bistro quiche: great, wonderful light eggy texture, freshly made quiche. I've had quite a lot of the reheated variety, which is often tolerable, and this was much better! Breakfast burrito: he ate every bit of it. He would have preferred a bit more of the pico de gallo with the food; the teensy round dish for the pico held not much. Coffee: tasty; I do not understand why they do not have raw sugar for the coffee -- Crave does thge same thing: good coffee, no raw sugar. I think the very slight molasses flavor of the turbinado sugar goes beautifully with coffee: perhaps they will consider it if they read it here? Or if more people ask. And yeah, I do bring my own just because this is such a common issue. Raisin bread French toast: we split this instead of getting bakery stuff, and it was soft and delicious. Lovely texture.

When we ordered a multi-pound cookie order ahead, as it says on the website one should do, we still found on pickup day (after 2 pm) that: 1) there were people browsing the pastry case who were ahead of us, three different parties, and there was no mechanism for communicating that the pickup for the multi-pound order was here, and 2) once everyone had made their selections (I don't know, dear, what do you think? Excuse me, those look like canolis. Are they?), and been checked out, with much conversation about what kind of change the customer would prefer, etc., we found that even though they'd been called 30 minutes before to say that the order placed two days earlier was about to be picked up, they had not actually made up the package. So then it was another wait while the friendly guy who had asked about change and so forth made up a single plate with three pounds of cookies on it. Are you thinking three pounds will not fit on a single plate with a domed lid? You'd be correct. The lid didn't fit.  I felt like Hansel and Gretel dropping a trail of cookies (well, OK, only two cookies! And I ate the one that fell on my car instead of the ground...mmm, cookie) out to the car. Fortunately I had some Chinet plates along and could rearrange the cookies at the other end. But the cookies were so late that we couldn't spare the time to pick up coffee from Starbucks, which had been the original plan. All that said, the cookies were light and delicious, especially the small coconut macaroons and the apricot-centered bows. It's just that if you are ordering for a function, get there WAY ahead of time; an hour ahead was not enough time to pick up and get the stuff down to where it needed to be, a 15-minute drive south of the bakery. My guess is that getting there in the morning would be fine; the cookies keep for up to a day covered at room T without losing their delightful texture.

So: quality is four stars, service, especially checkout and how order-ahead pickups are handled, not four stars. "A-OK" is about all I'm gonna go on this for now. I'll still order from them, I just won't trust that it's packed up and ready on the day specified. Maybe they will put some procedure in place to make that process more reliable?

Beware of buying baked goodies after you have eaten a full meal. A display case of the daily desserts, ranging from bite size cookies to decadent cakes is right next to cashiers-don't say I didn't warn you :-).  Nice place for breakfast and lunch. They won me over with their Portuguese rolls (I always buy a pack before leaving) for most of their sandwich offers. Healthy side choices. Service has always been friendly (sometimes a little slow), but the servers are always gracious and you don't mind waiting for the tasty offerings. Wouldn't mind it if they changed their lemonade brand though.

Best of the best! Never expected such a great find.