Madeline's

10:51 - 11:33 am

Madeline's is known as the place where friends gather. We were expecting to be the youngest friends that were gathering for brunch, but surprisingly, we weren’t. We did become friends with the other tables because we sat in a room so quiet that all you could do was be aware and hear every detail of the conversations around us. Madeline’s attempts to feel like an upscale, fancy-ish restaurant in an older style home. It has a lot of dark color palettes and feels like your wealthy great aunt’s house if she doesn’t quite understand what it means to be fancy. The staff was overly friendly (like the greeter startled us with how loud she said “welcome in friends, it’s good to see you!”). It was a weird vibe, like the wait staff were all dressed in formal black attire and our waitress was definitely a robot of some sort. Our table had a tablecloth and cloth napkins as well as goblets for the water, so we felt out of place. The ketchup also came out in little ceramic dishes, so that is the level of the establishment that we are eating at.

Once we sat at our fancy table, our waitress brought out a plate of assorted pastries, which was very unexpected. However, the pastries were honestly the highlight of the meal. It included two blueberry (we think) muffins, a little raspberry Danish, and a cinnamon roll-ish item. All were warm, like they were fresh baked. The raspberry Danish was by far the best, but the muffins were yummy as well. 

Lastly, the service felt very slow despite the lack of customers and the amount of employees. Granted, the hostess and bussers looked like literal children (probably 15-16 years old) and the young ones were not the most professional. We did overhear gossip that one of the bussers had a thing with one of the bartenders, so while they were trying to be professional on the outside, they are just kids on the inside.

Bethany

I got water automatically served to me and I ordered a decaf coffee. Honestly, the decaf was some of the best decaf coffee I've had in a while. It was very smooth with a good flavor, and you could tell it was fresh. The water at first was really good but after the refills came out for some reason it started to smell like wet dog. Despite my thirst, the smell really turned me away from wanting any more water. I got the bacon avocado breakfast wrap with (you guessed it) eggs, bacon, and avocado along with cheddar cheese and pico de gallo with a side of sour cream. Based on the ingredients, it sounds like we are going a Mexican route, right? Wrong. It’s on a sun-dried tomato basil wrap. It made no sense and it was not a good wrap. The bacon was not crispy enough which made it hard to eat, the pico de gallo was just diced tomato with no pico to be found, there was maybe 2 slices of avocado in the whole wrap (don’t have avocado in the name if you’re going to short me on it), and the ratio of egg to other ingredients was 4:1 and with the eggs giving hotel scrambled egg vibes, it was just not good. Instead of home fries, I got french fries, which I actually enjoyed. They had a bit of seasoning on them like the frozen curly fries do at the grocery store. I enjoyed dipping them in my ceramic cup of ketchup.

Ben

I ordered the usual. My orange juice came out with ice cubes which felt bizarre. It wasn't even good orange juice. I'm assuming they just had a pitcher sitting out unrefrigerated so they had to put in ice cubes or else it would have been hot. The plate of eggs benedict comes out looking very fancy. Or, well, their concept of fancy. The piece of ham was very thin, almost imperceivable and the egg was cooked very well. The muffin was fine. The hollandaise had such a butter flavor to it, I'm not convinced it wasn't just butter flavor that they added to it or something weird like that. It was too buttery. Maybe there was also butter on the english muffin, I don't know but their butter was too buttery in a bad way with a kind of off flavor. The potatoes had good bits with lots of color. The seasoning is like a very generic blend that you find at all restaurants. It’s trying to be upscale but isn’t. This entire experience is…just imagine if you were to do all the traditional stereotypes of a restaurant that are kind of bad but they are trying to be “upscale” and that's what this place would do. Anyway, some pieces were good and actually crisp and I saved those for the end to try to have bites of just the crisp part. But then there's also chunks in there that were hard, like borderline raw. It was a mess.

Rating

Danish saved the hotel breakfast