Earlier this week I found this "Drunk Rabbit Easter Egg Hunt Brunch" on Instagram. It was positioned as a local event at The Cellar out in Irving/Las Colinas where they offered brunch and an adult-only Easter egg hunt following. Drinks were $2 mimosa and $4 Bloody Marys and the event itself cost $20, reservations required. I did some additional research about this particular event and found it incredibly difficult to find. The Cellar website had no posts about it. They had no tweets about it on their Twitter. I eventually found a Facebook event that had no interaction on it. They clearly didn't want people to know about it. (I should have seen this as a sign.)
Delicious warm mimosa
My friend Jamie and I reserved tickets and ventured out there all excited about our cheap mimosas and Easter egg hunt. Why wouldn't we be. All of that sounds awesome! Upon arrival we walked into The Cellar to nothing. We followed some other girls downstairs (to the cellar... clever) and we see a couple rows of tables set up with a small amount of people and a tiny buffet. No one is there to tell you what to do. Do we seat ourselves? Are the tables set up by reservation? I have my ticket, is anyone going to take it, or scan it, or just casually glance at my phone screen with false interest to make sure that I followed the rules? We find the only table left open, it was all the way in the back corner, in the dark, under a fan, and had no chairs. Thankfully the girls that came in just before us didn't need all their chairs so we grabbed them for ourselves. Again, we are left with a feeling of complete confusion. Do we wait for the waitress? Do we just get up and eat? Eventually someone told us that the waitresses (sorry, waitress, there was only one) is only there to give drinks, food and non-alcoholic beverages are at the buffet. Oh and the buffet wasn't fully ready with all the hot food but if we wanted to eat we could.
We ended up getting biscuits, sans gravy since that wasn't ready yet, sausage, potatoes, pancakes, deviled eggs, some grapes (which were still in giant bushels on the serving platter, no one bothered to separate them a little), donut holes or cake pops, neither of us were really sure, and some mini muffins. Let's go through these items one by one:
- Biscuits: Clearly Grand biscuits that were either made the night before or a little over done. The outside was very dry but the inside were decent. Gravy or butter would have gone a long way.
- Sausage: This was decent. We each only had one.
- Potatoes: Literally the best thing on the buffet.
- Pancakes: Seemed like they were cooked the night before.
- Deviled Eggs: So I don't eat deviled eggs, it's something about the whipped center so I tried one and wasn't sure if it tasted right or not. Since I couldn't tell I assumed they weren't supposed to taste the way they did. Jamie loves deviled eggs and told me they were not supposed to taste the way they did. Neither of us finished our singular deviled egg.
- Grapes: Unless you served me rotten fruit it would be real difficult to screw this one up.
- Donut Holes/Cake Pops: Sugar-coated sugar overdosing on sugar. I think I got a cavity just looking at them. Pretty sure they were purchased from Kroger the day before from the bakery clearance rack.
- Mini Muffins: Again, store bought muffins. The blueberry were good, the bran were dry,
Our table lacked ketchup, so I stole some from another table. We shared our hot sauce with this couple seated near us. Our salt would not come out of the shaker and we realized that the reason was because it was solid. We opened up the shaker and broke up the salt ourselves.
As we ate our food we started to comment on how horribly unorganized this event was. We watched as the staff (of 3) set up tables and chairs as the event went on. If you have to reserve a ticket why wouldn't you already have an idea of how many tables and chairs you need, and then over compensate? It wasn't even that crowed, maybe 50 people were there.
This was everyone.
Where we were sitting it was incredibly dark, which might have been a blessing since then we didn't have to see the food. Jamie went back for a second round of potatoes and also brought some concoction of food back with her. We weren't sure what it was. Jamie told me "I brought this because it has peas and meat in it. I figured we could try this together. I think it's some kind of hamburger helper." After staring at it for a moment trying to figure out what it was we both tried it. It was not good. We both basically forced ourselves to swallow it, then we washed that down with some nice warm mimosa. Yes, warm mimosa. Not warm because it was sitting there, but came to us warm. What we found out was that we ate "Breakfast Shepard's Pie". We took a camera flashlight to the plate and found potatoes (which tasted like potato chips), peas, onions, meat, cheese (?) and hopefully gravy.
I'm sorry for that picture, but I actually ate it. So #sorrynotsorry
After "brunch", if that's what you call it, it was time for the Really Kinda Sober Rabbit Easter Egg Hunt. This lasted about a whole minute before all the eggs were taken. Depending on how close you were to the door when they announced the time to go directly affected how well you did. I got 3 eggs, Jamie got 7. The first guy that bolted out of the door had a basket full of eggs and another girl had zero. Most of the prizes were candy, some were coupons for drinks or appetizers, big eggs had little alcohol bottles. There were also some "grand prizes" but neither of us won those so not sure what they were. We left this cluster of a brunch immediately after that.
Over-flowing with goodies
This was a series of unfortunate events. The Cellar acted like they were caught off-guard by a brunch that they planned. Everything was a scramble and nothing went according to plan it seemed. They tried but they let the idea of this event overwhelm them so it didn't reach the potential it had. It was a real disappointment to see something fail so miserably.
