Ray's Family Restaurant

Food was great. Place is small and crowd during the weekends. I know why this place is popular.  Service is great and food comes fast and hot. Excellent.

Always go there to eat on weekends.I live in Chicago every weekend around this area and stop by here for breakfast ..very.friendly ...excellent price....love their homestyle  hash browns.. You won't regret it just get there early get packed fast for breakfast

My work schedule allows me to have mid-week weekends.

Some weeks I only work 3 days and if it happens that I get 2 consecutive weekdays off, I get a mid-week weekend.  

So one mid-week weekend, or Tuesday as some people might call it, we had a day of errands to run and needed a place to fuel up.  With our first errand completed, I searched for a place to eat.  Ray's happened to be within 5 minutes of St. Joseph's Hospital in Elgin.  I used to work at St. Joe's, and I would always hear that Ray's was great for the morning meal, but never made it a point to try it out.

Wish I tried them earlier.  

This place is on the East side of Elgin, near Rt. 25 and Rt. 20.  You might miss it, it's pretty small.  When we walked in, at 0900 am, there were 2 tables left.  Our server was almost the same server you've seen in movie diners, wearing that waitress dress, white orthopedic looking shoes, plastic-rimmed cat-eye glasses....

Or maybe I was imagining it.  Because this place just looks like every diner I've ever seen in a movie.  

Goodfellas.  When Henry meets with Jimmy to discuss his case and Jimmy asks Henry to whack somebody.

Reservoir Dogs.  Mr. Pink discusses his philosophy on tipping, while the virtues of the song "Like a Virgin" are pored over.

Pulp Fiction.  Honey Bunny and Pumpkin discuss various disadvantages of robbing liquor stores, banks and jewelry stores, and why restaurants are the ideal place to knock over.

Casino.  Ace catches Ginger with that smarmy James Woods, I mean Lester Diamond.  Lester then gets his tuchus handed to him in the parking lot.

I understand that all of the situations I've listed are gangster-y in nature, but none of the above activities occured at Ray's.  The only crime committed was the murdering I put on my Denver omelette.  The short order cooks here are really true to the name.  I pretty much asked for it, the waitress turned around, turned back around and dropped an omelette in front of me.  

It also happened to be very good.  I'm a little particular about omelettes; I'm not crazy about filled omelettes, where the egg is cooked, the ingredients put in the middle and the egg folded over, like a blintze.  I like where egg and ingredient are molded together in the pan, then folded onto a plate, because that's how I do it at home.  And that's how they do it at Ray's.  And the ratio of egg to ingredient was perfect, every square inch of egg had some ham, green pepper, or onion in it.  All omelettes come with hash browns and toast.  The tap water tastes good and the coffee is refilled early and often.  

I vote that you come out to Ray's and eat a home-cooked meal.  (see what I did there?)