Review Mon Mar 31 2008

Milk and Honey Revisited

I made the trip over to Milk and Honey (1920 West Division) this past Saturday for brunch, and am still scratching my head over the experience. In a normal restaurant, I can handle putting my name on a list and waiting until my table is ready. But Milk and Honey is a place whose popularity really can't handle its precious seating concept, at least on the weekends; I waited over twenty minutes in the line to order, which curled around the restaurant, then at least another twenty minutes standing like a schmuck cooped up in the corner, watching the lucky ones who ordered before me eat their food and hoping my silent "Finish your panini and split, Andy and Laura" ESP-ish beams would clear up some of the issues. It didn't.

When my friend and I were finally seated, I was served the slice of lemon poppyseed bread I had ordered as a side; I had watched it sit out on a kitchen counter for the half-century that passed while I waited for my table, and I doubt the time it spent outside of the bakery case was to blame, but the texture of the bread was incredibly hard, dry and grainy and the flavor not as obvious. A huge disappointment for a place that has its own Bake Shop down the street.

I had ordered the Huevos Rancheros, which was served casserole-style with a side of seasoned sour cream; I thought the dish was quite good (it may have been my hunger that made it tastier), but given that many other brunch places serve basically the same dish, it alone wouldn't bring me back to Milk and Honey. The place has a charming interior and solid (although less creative than I remembered) menu, but the crowded chaos makes eating there seem like a cattle drive. On my way home, I saw three other restaurants within feet of Milk and Honey whose exteriors bore huge signs advertising their own weekend brunch menus; even though those places looked like they had markedly less personality than Milk and Honey, they had open tables, which on a bleary-eyed weekend morning look a lot better than anything a bowl of Huevos Rancheros could fix.

- Robyn