The Church Ladies and the Veggie Melt

Down I-5, a little southeast of Wilsonville, lies a little town of little consequence. It is the town where I work. I think I can safely say that the skateboard park could be the most exciting part of Canby.

Restaurants are not Canby's strength. And sometimes when I do venture past the microwave for lunch, I have a culinary adventure. Like today.

There's a new restaurant in town. Biscuits Cafe (with multiple locations around the Portland metro area, Canby is their newest.) The first thing I saw when I walked in was a wooden sign for the restrooms (is that really the first thing you want someone to see when they walk into a restaurant?), which said in large, white, childish writing: "RESTROOMZ". Do they think that we think that a kid really made the sign? Because it's too neat to be by a kid, but misspelled and too messy to be by an adult. So what does that tell us? I don't even want to think about the meeting where someone decided that Kute Kid writing would be a great idea. But hey, what do I know? (Besides how to spell the word "restrooms.")

I could almost smell the nursing home where surely most of the customers must have come from. I was seated in the corner, diagonally from three church ladies. Since the waitress was pretty slow with my food, I stared at the church ladies and eavesdropped on their conversation, in between texting myself with their comments that I just had to remember.

"We're going to put little statues of animals all over. It will be very nice," said the talkative one. The lady with the cross around her neck nodded.

"That will be very nice." The white-haired lady across from them didn't respond. Then the talkative one repeated it louder. "WE'RE GOING TO PUT LITTLE STATUES OF ANIMALS ALL OVER." Then the white-haired head nodded.

"My grandson. The only time he goes to church is when he's with us. He has visitation with our son at our house every other week. So that's good." The crossed lady nodded. "I mean their lives are just so fragile. Their mother, she's nice and everything, but she doesn't have a husband."

"MY GRANDSON. HE GOES TO CHURCH WHEN HE VISITS US." The white head nodded again.

I had to stop from laughing out loud. But that was easier once my plate of food arrived. I had ordered a Veggie Melt. Olives, mushrooms, peppers and onions with blue cheese and jack cheese. Holy hell. There was so much cheese on that sandwich that it must have weighed 1/2 pound. And the white bread was heavily buttered, lightly toasted and soggy. The blue cheese added in that slightly moldy flavor of cheese gone bad. I'm afraid it wasn't good. The fries were pretty hot, though and kind of good, in a Denny's sort of way.

There was a sign in a stand on the table that said "Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice. Gently Pasteurized." Huh. Kind of weird to advertise that. If the juice is squeezed and then pasteurized, is it really fresh squeezed? And what exactly does "gently" mean? Maybe someone could enlighten me on that subject - I'm no science scholar, or juice scholar for that matter.

Biscuits Cafe serves breakfast all day, which might be the only reason I go back. If one day, I'm just sitting at my desk craving the pancakes my grandma used to make like I was five again then, I might jaunt over to Biscuits Cafe, where I could both see a replica of my grandma and eat replicas of her pancakes.

Biscuits Cafe
102 N. Ivy St.
Canby, OR
www.biscuitscafe.com
"We don't serve fast food... We serve fresh food as fast as we can!"

Monday - Saturday: 6:30am - 2:30pm
Sunday: 7:00 am - 2:30pm