Critic's Review
First Watch has intrigued me for a while; a couple of times when I was up in Boca I tried to go, but both times there was a wait; and I don't wait to eat breakfast. On a rainy Saturday at about 1:45pm, I was driving by and the parking lot looked pretty empty. So I thought I'd give it a try.
It's a modest looking place, with commercial carpeting, an ikea style register area, a big black board with specials and some artwork that is meant to look like juvenile drawings. It's sort of a cross between the Original Pancake House and Denny's.
The menu has a lot of "special" recipes so I needed some time to look it over. My server brought me coffee fairly quickly. They give you a good sized cup and a whole pot, so you don't have to be bothered with endless "warm-ups". The coffee is pretty strong.
This is the kind of place where the empty creamers and sugar packets stay on the table for the entire duration of your visit. It's not a real diner. I decided on the Italian omelet, aka the Via Veneto, which is described as having italian sausage, roasted tomatoes, peppers, mozzarella and parmesan. A runner brought it out. You can certainly tell that they're cooking on a clean stove that isn't turned up too high.
The omelet was pretty disappointing. I expected this to be loaded with tomatoes and cheese. This omelet has a good amount of sausage, a small amount of diced peppers and maybe 2 or 3 pieces of diced tomatoes. A small amount of mozzerella; I couldn't detect any parmesan or "fresh herbs". The potatoes were fine; the english muffin was some off-brand; not a Thomas'. For $11.60 this was a pretty weak breakfast.
I was expecting something like this that I made for myself a few months back:
Now that's breakfast.