The Wild Brunch

As I imagine will be the case for a little while, I told Cherise to pull a ‘cheap date’ out of the Jar for my first date to organise (organize). My first effort would be planning an ‘Out for Coffee’ date. This was fine with me… cause as I’m sure everyone knows, a coffee date really needs to be a breakfast date! As Cherise works in the week and also on Saturday mornings, that left Sunday. In essence, the ‘Coffee date’ had quickly become a brunch date.

The Plan

As I’m still very new to the area and New Jersey in general, I began Googling for restaurants that serve breakfast and found a plethora of places in the area. It can be overwhelming when there are too many options (I’m British; we’re just not used to it), so I thought I’d ask a friend who had a bit of inside knowledge. I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that he, too, came back with plenty of suggestions. ‘For substantive, Charcoal. For bakery, The Gingered Peach. For bagels, Udo’s Bagels. For convenience, It’s Nutts.’ … I guess at least he narrowed it down. He did also mention that, if we went to Charcoal, to take some champagne because their ‘OJ makes bombass mimosas’; naturally, that settled it. Although Champagne doesn’t exactly scream ‘cheap date’, it was BYOB and Wegmans do a perfectly reasonable Prosecco type thing for $6.

After reviewing the menu at Charcoal and reading about their specials, I decided that we would go there Sunday morning at about 10. I would hide the Champagne and put it in the fridge on Saturday night so Cherise wasn’t aware that it was BYOB and couldn’t look up the location. Now for anyone who knows Cherise, they will know that she has a deep love of perusing… no, lusting over menus; I didn’t want to take that away from her. So I decided I would copy the menu (removing identifying marks) and email it to her on the Friday so she could look over it. Charcoal is right on the Delaware River and so it is a prime spot for people going to brunch; a lot of people online suggested there might be a wait time and sadly they don’t take reservations in the morning. I was just hoping that the wait wouldn’t be too long. Not to resort to stereotypes but no one wants to be waiting for an hour with a hangry wife… or husband.

The Date

Charcoal is around  a 10 minute drive from our apartment, just over the bridge in Yardley, Pennsylvania. We got there at about 10:15 and it was clearly very busy, but we managed to find street parking relatively quickly. When we walked in, there were a lot of  people waiting and when I checked in with the hostess, I was told it would be about a 45 minute wait, which obviously isn’t ideal. Cherise didn’t seem to mind too much as neither of us were starving yet. So we waited and people watched until our table was ready, which it turned out was in almost exactly 45 minutes.

We were seated by the window and had a great view of the Delaware River. The weather had actually improved somewhat from the initial miserable grey morning and some blue sky and sun was now shining down, shimmering and reflecting off the water. Without prompting, the waitress clocked the prosecco and asked if we wanted some orange juice (Hell yes!). So, we ordered that and a coffee each (as stipulated by the Jar of Dates). Then, we got to the fun task of looking at the specials menu. All of the food sounded great… there was more standard fare: ‘Eggs Benedict’, ‘omelettes’, etc and on the specials page there were things like ‘glazed Santa Fe French Toast with bacon’, which I think we can all agree is difficult to read or say without salivating.

Being dull and British, I went with a build your own omelette and chose sausage, onion and cheddar cheese. Cherise mentioned the Lobster Benedict (the most expensive item on the menu) and then within a few seconds, she said ‘can I order the most expensive thing on the menu?’ To which I said, ‘of course’.

The coffee was very good; I had seen that they were selling bags of it by the entrance. The OJ was indeed delicious and it definitely made ‘bombass mimosas’. Both Cherise and I enjoyed our meals too; the lobster in particular (which I was allowed to try) was fantastic. We ordered a glazed brioche doughnut to go, which we then tried later that night. There was some chocolate coffee sauce with it that I can only assume god herself produced in a moment of unrivaled genius.

All in all, our ‘cheap coffee date’ consisting of lobster and champagne set us up nicely for the day and I think it was a moderate success

Stats

• Mileage: 8.8 miles total: 4.4 miles each way.
• Total cost of the date: About $56, including gratuity and the bottle of Prosecco
• Cherise’s rating: 4/5
• Simon’s rating: 4/5
• What the planner would change next time: Whilst we were waiting to be seated, we noticed that people had phoned ahead and checked in. If I had researched a little better, perhaps this could have avoided the prolonged wait before we were seated.

Cherise Says:

It was a challenge not to try to figure out where we would be eating (once I learned that we would be eating somewhere); I am terrible at surprises. As soon as we turned onto the Washington Crossing Bridge, I assumed we were headed for New Hope so I actually enjoyed going somewhere unexpected. And you cannot go wrong with lobster and champs, which made me feel bougie (or are we spelling it boujee now?) all day.

Check back next week – it’s a record store date!