bayou blues

About a week ago I stumbled upon the menu for Bayou, the new Cajun place in midtown. Unfortunately we didn’t make it there until today, two days after Sara Bozich wrote about it in her Thursday column. Sara seems to have had a great experience; mine was not as positive.

Before I get into that, though, I’d like to offer you the web-premiere of this tidbit of information: Bayou serves breakfast on Saturdays until 1pm. They don’t mention this on their own website, nor were the hours mentioned in Sara’s column. But now you know.

Wait wait, maybe I shouldn’t tell you that. Bayou tells callers that they serve breakfast until 1pm, and 1pm is what is posted on the door. However, today they stopped serving by about noon, because they’d run out of almost everything.

“We’ve never been this busy,” the two servers kept telling customers. “Usually on Saturdays we just have one person working, but today we had to call in reinforcements.” Sara’s opinion must be highly respected, as I think it should be.

When we arrived a little after 11 the restaurant was nearly full. Here’s a picture, taken by Fred and his phone:

We were able to get a table right away, though, and after just a few minutes we were even able to get a menu. Bayou’s breakfast menu is limited, but offers enough options that nearly everyone (barring those with unusual dietary restrictions, I suppose) should be able to find something to please them. As Sara mentions, Bayou serves beignets and caffe au lait, as well as an eggs/potatoes option, an assortment of coffee cakes, and a couple of other items. Today, though, they were out of beignets and coffee cake.

I ordered the Bayou Breakfast: two eggs, cajun home fries, and a cheese biscuit ($4) with sausage (another $4). We both ordered caffe au lait (apparently $4 for one, $5 for two — but I’m not clear on this). The caffe piece of the caffe au lait arrived in a small French press not yet pressed. A nice touch. The steamed milk wasn’t ready yet, though, and we waited several more minutes for it to arrive.

Many more minutes later, our breakfasts arrived. They looked good, although the waitress informed us that they were out of cheese biscuits and so we received an English muffin each instead. Additionally, there was no sausage in sight — instead we’d both been given bacon. I asked for sausage; the waitress apologized and said she’d bring some. Also, she said she’d bring silverware.

By the time we did get our silverware, the eggs were cold. The potatoes were also less-than-hot, but they were otherwise perfect. I can only imagine how good they would be if they were warm.

My sausage arrived after I’d finished eating, despite my attempts to eat slowly in anticipation. Kindly, the waitress offered to put it in a to-go box, and said she wasn’t going to charge us for it. It did, however, appear on the bill. Twice. She deducted one instance of it. We asked; she said something complicated that seemed to imply that we were somehow coming out ahead in this deal. While everything else about the experience was forgiveable, that’s just bad customer service and not a good way to get people to return.

But I will return. Maybe not for breakfast in the near future, but I’d like to go back for dinner because the food was good enough, and the menu interesting enough, that if the staff can get their act together, I think Bayou will be a fantastic addition to the Harrisburg dining scene. And eventually I will return for breakfast, because I’d rather go there than to Cracker Barrel and there are few good options for Saturday breakfast.

I will add this advice to any establishment: if you are written up in the paper, it is always better to over-staff and over-stock in the following days. If you lose a little money, it’s a shame, but that’s better than providing a mediocre dining experience, and far better than turning away customers because you’ve run out of food.