People clearly love this place. At 8 AM on a Sunday morning, there was already a pretty good crowd…read more
I've been doing meetups at local coffee shops for the past several weeks, and sometimes it's kind of a ghost town, even if the food and coffee is good.
I'd suggest that people were there to visit downtown St. Charles, or whatever it's called, which has a certain old-timey charm to it, but everything else was closed--presumably until later in the day, but who knows. That fentanyl is a menace.
Parking could be a pain, if it's not the wee hours of the morning on a weekend, and you're not ambulatory enough to walk from a block or two over, and yet you're going to get essentially the equivalent of a milkshake and a donut.
Inside is rustic, inviting and larger than you'd think, with an upstairs area that I didn't bother to explore, due to lack of curiosity. We had a larger group and ended up pushing a few smaller tables together, plus a few chairs we borrowed from other tables. No one seemed to mind. The key is not to ask first. That mentality will take you far in both the world of finance and dating.
I'm kind of over ordering food from coffee shops, where they're obviously just throwing something in the microwave and charging you $10 for it, but I needed something to eat. I'd just gone for a run. Their burrito looked like the textbook definition of cultural appropriation, but it also looked like it might not be half bad. I had their equivalent of an Egg McMuffin, called Ron's Breakfast Sandwich, or something to that effect.
When I hear the name Ron, I of course think of Sasso from Carlito's Way, but that probably says more about me than anything else. I'm assuming he didn't have anything to do with this. Essentially, this was a store-bought English muffin, a surprisingly generous and delicious helping of cheddar cheese, a few slices of seemingly prepackaged black forest ham and a fried egg.
It was fine for what it was. Could the egg have been salted, could the muffin have been buttered and could the ham been an actual slice of Canadian bacon, or even better, American bacon? Sure, but I went into this with low expectations. The cheddar was melty and delicious, and weirdly abundant, but processed American cheese would have been more fitting for this kind of sandwich. You'd think a guy named Ron wouldn't object to processed foods.
The caramel frappe I had was amazing. I got it with whole milk and whipped cream. I didn't bother to check and see if they charge you extra for whipped cream, which is the kind of crap some of these places have been known to pull. I got the 16 oz instead of the 20 oz, but it was probably still enough to take a day off the end of my life (when I don't need it as much anyway fwiw). Sometimes, when a food item tastes good enough, you can just tell it's not good for you, and that was the case with this drink. It was decidedly rich.
I'm never in this part of town, and if I were, it would be at night, natch, but if things ever get to the point where they're clearly trending in that direction, I might start stopping by on the reg and getting that caramel frappe just to speed along the process of my demise.
