Basic Brunches does Rapscallions

Rapscallion. Typically known as a mischievous person, in this case I am referring to the mischievous (somewhat) new restaurant located in Lower Greenville. Although they've been receiving rave reviews for their standard lunch and dinner options, back in September they opened up their doors just a littler earlier than usual to start serving brunch.

Rapscallions lovely brick facade.

Typically, I will admit, I keep to my comfort zone. I live in Far North Dallas where Addison, Plano and Frisco are king. I occasionally travel to Uptown for brunch because, to be fair, their brunch scene is on point. Also their demographic is 20-something career kids that love nothing more than getting turnt the night before and hitting some hair of the dog on Sunday mornings and Instagramming about it. But Lower Greenville is an area that I have yet to venture to. For this brunch a fellow Instagrammer Vicky D invited me out so we could finally meet in person and she chose the place.

While parking is slightly limited in the surrounding area, and everywhere threatens to tow you, Lower Greenville is quite quaint. Cute little walkable streets with plenty of food and shopping options. It's a place I need to explore more. Upon arrival to Rapscallions it seemed like it could accommodate our party of two but were told there was a 30 minute wait that obviously started with us because no one else was waiting yet. We said we'd sit outside but it was deemed too cold to serve on the patio, although this is Texas and really you just need to wait 5 minutes. Our wait ended up being no more than 20 minutes.

Rapscallions is the Lower Greenville version of Ida Claire. With their farm to table, "eclectic" menu and their hipster dressed waiters with ironic facial hair all over the place. The only difference really was that at Ida Claire they serve their mimosas with Rose while Rapscallions does their mimosas the traditional way with champagne. The menu is very limited and savory heavy. If you are interested in some kind of sweet dish like french toast I recommend you look elsewhere. The only sweet options on the menu were located on the appetizer section. And while, yes, you could easily turn the monkey bread into a personal meal, I wouldn't recommend it.

It's not much in way of full brunch meal

We ordered the Gammy's Monkey Bread to share which came out looking delicious and it did not disappoint. It was warm and just the right amount of goo for pull apart bread. It will get all over your hands if you choose to eat it that way. But it's very easy to pull apart so using your fork is a more civilized option.

Monkey Bread for two!

Vicky was debating about getting the "Old Soba" which is a NOLA style lo mein dish which is a pork head broth with pork belly and shaved pork collar. There are noodles and an egg in there too but you are looking at consuming all parts on a pig. She ended up picking the Duck Confit Hash because hash is her weakness, The hash is sweet potatoes, onions, peppers, poached duck egg and duck fat hollindase.

I went a different route and choose The Big Biscuit. Typically biscuits and gravy isn't my thing unless I'm getting it at Old West and it's smothered with eggs, potatoes, cheese and spinach but this looked like it would be good. It's a house-made sausage patty on top on the house-made biscuit with a heavy pour of pork fat gravy and two sunny side eggs. I personally don't like my eggs sunny side up so I asked for them to be cooked just a little longer. While the dish was as good as it looked I will admit that cutting the biscuit proved difficult at times.

The Big Biscuit!

The only, slightly ridiculous, thing that happened on our brunch trip was once we got up to leave the table next to us decided that we were inconveniencing them by sitting there because not only did they want to spread out a bit but they also wanted out chairs. As we got up to walk out we heard one of the ladies at our neighboring table say "Finally" and snag one of the chairs. Really?

Overall I would go to Rapscallions again but it's a place you need to be craving. With the limited menu and small space you need to want savory food and be ok with a wait. The food is done well and worth the wait but the menu prices are a little high.

Double Brunch Weekend

You know what's better than brunch? DOUBLE BRUNCH! You heard me. Brunch on Saturday and brunch on Sunday. Brunch for days. That's exactly what I did the other weekend and it was glorious. Both the places I went are in Uptown, admittedly probably the best location in Dallas to have brunch. I'm not an Uptown girl, nor do I live in an Uptown world, but I will visit to eat there sometimes.

Saturday Brunch:

Little known fact, in Klyde Warren Park on Saturday mornings there are a bunch of free workout classes. I found this out via D Town Sweat. On the last day of the month they post a calendar of free workout events all around Dallas, and who doesn't love free? Alex agreed to go with me and we planned on doing the 9 AM Bootcamp followed by the 10 AM yoga. At 9 AM it was already blistering hot and terribly humid so by 9:15 we knew that yoga wasn't going to happen. The class was brutal, but it's a workout.

After that we grabbed Alex's roommate and walked over to Company Cafe.

Walked because Company Cafe is right off the Katy Trail.

That's the sign off to the left. See literally right off the Katy Trail.

Couple of pluses to Company Cafe. Everyone was there in workout clothes so you don't have to feel pressured to get super fancy or "Uptown Pretty" as I call it. Also, it's a farm-to-market type restaurant, so all the dishes were fresh with quality ingredients. 

Alex got The Morning Glory:

Good morning glory.

It's buffalo meat and scrambled eggs over a bed of spinach, onions, peppers, mushrooms, with some guac and salsa on top. If you sub-out buffalo meat with turkey, because I assume buffalo meat is hard to find, you can easily make this dish at home.

Her roommate Brittany had The Deep Bowl:

This was sweet potato hash with bacon and beef, topped with avocado, two eggs and salsa. Another dish easily replicated at home.  

I created my own concoction of the Yard Sale over some biscuits and gravy:

The Yard Sale is an egg scrambler with bell pepper, onion  and giant chunks of mozzarella and either venison or turkey sausage. Naturally I went with venison because I love that deer meat. But I put all this over biscuits and gravy mimicking a Panhandler from Old Went Cafe in Denton. 

All this food was deserved after that workout, plus the walking to and from Company Cafe on the Katy Trail. 

Sunday Brunch:

Sunday Alex and I were supposed to meet up with a couple new Instagram Girls for an Insta-Brunch (if you will) and Boxwood Tap and Grill. The girls didn't end up making it so it was just Alex and myself.

This place was so cute. It's right on the corner of Thomas Ave and Allen Street. It's in a mixture of residential and shops so you have a nice view from the patio. The patio itself was like a little oasis.

With ivy growing on the walls, misters outside to cool you off, picnic tables with umbrellas for shade and TVs along the wall. It's a great little get away. 

Since it ended up being just Alex and I we got ourselves the Mimosa Trio. That is a bottle of champagne with three seasonal juices. We had the classic orange juice, strawberry-kiwi, and white cranberry. I prefer non-traditional juices for my mimosa when given the opportunity so I was hitting the strawberry-kiwi and white cranberry.  

Neither of us were overwhelmingly hungry so we decided to split the chicken fried chicken.

Gravy on gravy with gravy on the side.

We had the chicken fried chicken, which was fresh out the fryer hot topped with gravy, scrambled eggs, and cheddar biscuits topped with gravy. Basically everything was topped with gravy. No problem with that. The gravy was delicious. The cheddar biscuits were not Red Lobster but they were still good. Red Lobster cheddar bay biscuits are hard to beat though. One person could probably eat the dish but you would have to be hungry. It was the perfect size to split between two people. 

At the end of this weekend my blood had been replaced with gravy. Thick, delicious gravy. #NoRegrets. If I had to pick one over the other it would probably be Boxwood just because of it's patio, but it's hard to call because the food in both places was incredible. 

The Drunken Rabbit- Rather Sober- Easter Egg Hunt Brunch of Misery and Defeat.

I don't intend to write every week unless I do something that is really interesting and time sensitive. This event ended up being both time sensitive (Easter related) and an interesting story. Read "interesting" not "awesome". I fully believe this will be the worst brunch review I will ever write and I just started this en devour.

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:

1. 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.
2. Sausage: This was decent. We each only had one.
3. Potatoes: Literally the best thing on the buffet. 
4. Pancakes: Seemed like they were cooked the night before.
5. 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.
6. Grapes: Unless you served me rotten fruit it would be real difficult to screw this one up.
7. 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.
8. 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.