Imperial

Unrated

I want to love this restaurant. The food sounds really good, it's cute and cozy inside and it has a lot of potential to be one of those best kept secret kind of places. Unfortunately my review is not so great. The service was ok, friendly, nothing exceptional but definitely not a tip jar submission thankfully. As stated above, the food “sounds” really good, sadly the end result did not meet my expectations. They have 3 choices on the breakfast menu, the Main, which is 2 eggs, double smoked bacon, grilled ham and house sausage, the Vegetarian, which is a sweet potato, leek and feta frittata, and the Vegan, blueberry pancakes with whipped banana coconut filling. All three are served with roasted tomato provencal, sauteed mushrooms, breakfast potatoes and a butter grilled baguette. Sounds great doesn't it? I ordered the Vegetarian. And now here's where it takes a turn for the worst. Our food took exactly one hour to be served. Now, this restaurant is small, there are just over half a dozen tables, so if it's packed, it's really not that busy. But for a Saturday or Sunday brunch in Ottawa, a restaurant like that should have at least 2 cooks, or at least one that can handle a full restaurant. They had one, and she was not very fast. The plate sizes during that hour wait went from pretty full, to quite small. I have a feeling they were running out of food. Half a tomato became a sliver of tomato. A serving of sauteed mushrooms was reduced to 3 or 4 tiny little mushrooms. The grilled baguette wasn't baguette anymore, it was a very thinly cut half toast. And to top it off, our meals were cold. I tried the double smoked bacon from my friend's plate and there was no smokey flavour at all. My food was ok, I don't recall there being any feta in my frittata and I think I saw one tiny little piece of leek. The frittatas were pretty airy and the entire meal wasn't really enough to satisfy, especially not for the $10.75 price that went with it. On the menu board behind the counter I noticed their lunch and dinner foods, soups, salads, sandwiches and one entrée, a lasagna dish. The soups looked really good, a mushroom trio, buttercoconut squash and one that caught my eye on the specials board, sweet potato and thai peanut. I almost ordered one to go but by the end of my breakfast I was just really anxious to leave. All that said, I will go again, one more time. I'm hoping they were just having a bad day. Perhaps someone called in sick, maybe they had a massive flow of people just before we arrived, who knows. My friend Donnie went the day before and really enjoyed it. The service the day before was also slow, but the food was plentiful. They also do take-out, which could be very useful on some days. They are located next to Barrymore's on Bank.