Breakfast Nomination #14, Earthy in Causewayside

Breakfast Nomination #14, Earthy in Causewayside 

Nominated by a former Christmas Temp 

With our fourth guest reviewer Amy DG 

Originally reviewed on June 19th 2016 

"Hi, I don't think we've actually met before!" Amy to Gary half an hour after we finished breakfast and walked halfway to Tollcross together.  

Gary's score: 3.5 happy monkeys/6 
My score: does anyone know what they're doing here? 
Amy's score: full marks for food, slightly below half marks for service but still a pass all round. 

Gary ate: Shakshuka (Moroccan baked eggs) (£8) with a Strawberry banana Happy Monkey (£1.50) - which transpired to be a children's smoothie, this is not apparent on the menu! (waiter: "It's not just for kids!") 
I ate: scrambled eggs on toasted sourdough with bacon (not what I ordered) (£7) and an English Breakfast tea (£2.50) 
Amy ate: scrambled eggs with smoked tofu and potato hash (£8) and an Earl Grey tea and almond milk (£2.50) 
Total Cost: £29.50 for all of us, or £19 for just me and Gary. 

Our pros: nice, chilled out area with good ambience and relaxed music in the background; organic food; reasonably friendly service; interesting menu selections; water brought to table without asking, and fairly nice food. 
Our Cons: worryingly slow service; confused wait staff forgetting parts of our orders/not fully clarifying orders; quite expensive for what we got, and food was nothing special - even for being organic. 

Our experience: This breakfast review comes over a month after our last because my cousin, Amy, is a hard lady to pin down! Fleeing to Arran then to Berlin for various weeks but with her overdraft reaching breaking point, she finally returned to Scotland to help us with our review. 

Earthy is tucked away just off of Ratcliffe Terrace (not far from one of my old flats) and is essentially a food market for buying organic produce but has a café to go along with it as well. 

Initially we were struck by the nice ambience of the place - there was soft lighting, rustic tables and chairs, and big windows with plenty light coming it. It felt peaceful and the music playing wasn't invasive at all. 

A waitress approached our table promptly and gave us menus whilst she wiped down our table and made polite small talk - things were starting off well! 
Gary, Amy and I perused our options and were relieved to see some normal seeming menu choices as I was pretty sure when I'd checked online it seemed like a lot of nuts and seeds and crazy, non-breakfasty (and perhaps somewhat hippy-ish) choices but we were pleasantly surprised to see things such as jam! Toast! Scrambled eggs! And so forth. 

Gary branched out, trying the Moroccan dish on the menu whilst Amy went for the vegetarian but still somewhat exotic choice of smoked tofu with scrambled eggs. I went for the scrambled eggs with bacon, sausage, mushroom and tomato for a whopping £10, though this is not what I wound up receiving. 

I'd say within a few minutes we had decided what we wanted but we sat for almost bang on 15 minutes before we managed to give the appropriately British 'polite but somewhat pointed' eye contact to a nearby waitress to come and take our order - I point blank refuse to be one of those "AHEM, EXCUSE ME *snaps fingers*" patrons I so often see in eateries, though this does mean waiting for sometimes excessive amounts of time with rumbling tummies and a passive aggressive agitation that leads you to stare longingly, yet ferociously at any waiting staff in the nearby vicinity. 

Once the waiter came he said "Sorry!" and began to take our orders. Amy asked for soy milk with her tea and the waiter told her they had almond milk and possibly goat milk so she said she'd take the almond milk instead - I thought this was interesting, not that I would drink any kind of ridiculous milk other than dairy but it was nice to see a variety of dairy-free options there for customers. 
Gary ordered his strawberry banana Happy Monkey (all the information the menu supplied) and the waiter responded with "I like them too! They're not just for kids haha" which then made us wonder what the hell Gary had just ordered, even speculating he was about to be delivered some kind of baby food with a little plastic spoon. 

Another 15 minutes passed and we finally got given our drinks, or rather Amy and I were given our teas with no almond milk in sight and Gary's drink was non-existent. The waiter had forgotten to bring me a saucer so we assumed he'd leave and come back with everything else but instead he just delivered the saucer and left. 

After another few minutes of pointed eye contact with the wait staff, Gary eventually went up and explained his predicament that we weren't given his Happy Monkey or the almond milk, so they brought it over and apologised, though still seemed a bit confused about the whole process of delivering us things we actually ordered (and considering the waiter wrote down our whole order and reiterated it back to us after, we didn't think there would be a problem). It was then we discovered that the drink Gary had ordered was a smoothie that literally had "FOR KIDS!" written on the box, oops, but he drank it nonetheless. 

not just for kids!

The staff seemed worryingly confused the whole time we were there, even ten minutes earlier another waitress had wandered round all the tables with two plates literally asking customers who they belonged to and then wound up almost accidentally ignoring the two customers shouting "er, I think those are ours!" from the other side of the café. 

After another ten minutes, our food was delivered to the table - Gary and Amy's food looking quite spectacular and elaborate and mine looking like.... like... why the hell was I getting charged £10 for this? 

We took our obligatory food photos and began to make a start on our food. After I'd worked my way through maybe a quarter of my portion, I suddenly realised I was missing mushrooms, and tomato, and sausage! This was daylight robbery, did they think they could rob me of THREE ingredients and then charge me £10 at the end of it?  

thrilled to bits

Gary noted my distress but also my reluctance to cause a fuss (so very, very British) so he waved a staff member over and I explained the issue so she got our waiter to return. He knelt down by our table, looking nervous and almost upset - as if I was about to throw my plate of expensive food in his face and demand he bring me what I actually ordered. 

As it transpired, after him nervously explaining what had happened and hurriedly trying to console me with the offer of remaking my food or giving me a free coffee, there were two toast, scrambled eggs and bacon options on the menu - one coming literally as I've just stated and the other with mushrooms, sausage etc and because I didn't specify all the other ingredients (due to me not noticing there was another option just with scrambled eggs, toast and bacon) nor did he clarify which option I definitely wanted, I ended up getting lumbered with the other option that was thankfully not £10 but still a rather expensive £7. I ended up consoling the waiter as he looked like he was bracing himself for a full-on tirade of abuse from me, and told him it was ok and I'd eat what I'd been given as it was simply a misunderstanding. 
We finished up our meals, Gary feeling his had become somewhat bland the longer he ate it and me still feeling a little robbed. Amy, however, really enjoyed her food and couldn't fault it at all. 

After wondering if it was worth waiting to see how long it would take to get them to bring us the bill, Gary went up and paid, and they deducted the cost of one of the teas as they forgot the almond milk (if they'd deducted an item for every mistake they made, we may have wound up with a free meal) and after looking around for the toilets briefly, which I couldn't locate, and making a few sly notes in my notebook, we up and left. 

Roughly £10 a head for a breakfast doesn't sound too much in the grand scheme of things, and it's not much more compared to other places we've eaten but ultimately it seemed like we were paying extra for the organic produce. 
Considering we've eaten at Water of Leith Café and Blue Bear Café, both serving organically sourced produce, and they both had much fairer seeming prices versus the portions we were served, I felt this place had no justifiable reason to charge as much as they did for what you got. 

The layout and feel of the café was great, the service was friendly but it seemed like no one really knew what they were doing and were so afraid to fuck up that they fucked up anyway.

I'd be reluctant to go back based on the waiting times alone - 40 minutes from sitting down to having our food delivered when they were, at most, 1/3 full is not really justified. 

Not the worst place we've been to but not a whole lot of reasons to rush back! At the very least, it was nice to spend time with my favourite little cousin and have her meet Gary again, even though she has little to no memory of meeting him last October at my 25th (that's alcohol for you, guys). 

What's next: Peter's Yard in Stockbridge, nominated by the same (nameless) Christmas Temp.