Worth the Trip: Breakfasts
Aramark's Big Breakfast.
Campus Café
Lansdowne Campus
Big Breakfast
$5.59 plus tax
Presentation and service
Ed: It’s very rare to see Aramark make a decent platter of food that’s actually cheaper than the competition. Am I in the Twilight Zone? Great, now I have Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” stuck in my head! The cafeteria staff really needs to clean the tables more often. Nobody wants to eat at a dirty table.
Alan: I have a hard time separating the ambience of the campus caf at Lansdowne with the Fisher building washrooms across the hall. The dirty tables here seem to equate with urinals no one can pee into correctly. I think they even use the same tiles on the floors. Taste
E: Aramark’s breakfast is near perfect—the scrambled eggs were cooked just right, the bacon oinked at me, the hashbrowns had zest, and the toast… my god, the toast. I don’t remember the last time I tasted a slice of toast with the butter so evenly spread across it. I remember my high-school days when my home economics teacher showed us how to properly spread condiments. That lesson has stuck to me to this day.
A: Wax on, wax off, Daniel-san… funny what people remember. Anyway, yeah, this breakfast is pretty good! Somehow I anticipated it being covered in a greasy film, but it just wasn’t so. And price-wise, it’s a good deal! WTF, Aramark? W… T… F?
Apple Tree Restaurant
Hillside Mall
Breakfast Special (includes coffee)
$12.99 plus tax
Presentation and service
E: Has anyone ever missed the bygone days of having breakfast out at a farm? That’s what it feels like at Apple Tree. On this fine morning the sun was shining and I was waiting for a sheep to come out of nowhere and go “ba-aa.”
A: Uh, the Hillside Mall parking lot isn’t the most farm-y place I can think of, Ed. But it is nice and quiet. No wonder it’s a high-powered magnet for old people. Seriously, there are a lot of oldies that come here all the time. It must have the gravitational pull of a black hole to them.
Taste
E: I miss western-style breakfasts. What I eat at home is more like an eastern-style meal with a lot of rice and starch; that’s my Asian heritage. So the shiny sausages, crispy bacon, soft eggs, French toast, and sweet maple syrup... I’m drooling just thinking about it. The only thing missing is pancakes or waffles. The French toast makes up for it, but there wasn’t any sugar coating. There was butter and syrup, but I wanted to coat the French toast until it was candy-hard so I could get my daily sugar rush. I also wish this combo had more bacon. Another guilty pleasure of mine is burnt bacon. So what if it isn’t healthy?
A: I think both of us are serious candidates for heart attacks if we keep eating crap like this, Ed. My cousin warned his dad that if he didn’t get in shape, he’d have a heart attack. Then he proceeded to make a heart-attack joke that we thought was funny, but his dad and Grandma didn’t. The old people who eat here probably wouldn’t find it funny either.
And the winner is…
Aramark has an advantage with price and convenience; it manages to win again with a good, solid breakfast.
Verdict
Apple Tree has a much nicer ambience, and a breakfast that’s a teeny bit better, but it’s twice as much money as Aramark’s breakfast. For broke students, it’s really more of a special-occasion trip at best.
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