Dante's Kitchen

We love our lazy mornings at home, taking our time over coffee and tea and what-have-you, but once in a while we'll go out for breakfast (which usually turns out to be brunch, by the time we get our lazy selves out of the house), and so it was on Valentine's Day.  We'd seen Dante's Kitchen, 315 Main Street, East Greenwich advertised in the area magazines for quite some time, and it was on the list, so....today was the day.

When we got there, it was slammed!  Not really surprising, because East Greenwich seems to be a really hot destination for people who love to eat and no matter where we stop in, there's always a bunch of people who had the same idea.  The atmosphere was very cozy and welcoming, and despite the crowd the wait staff was right on top of things and got to us right away.  French vanilla coffee was our beverage of choice.  Lots of southern-inspired goodness on the menu!  After much consideration, Joe decided on the veggie breakfast burrito, which I also wanted but it contains scrambled eggs, which I can't do.  As there was no scrambled tofu option to replace the eggs,  I went with one of the day's specials, apple-cinnamon pancakes.  Joe was very pleased with the burrito.  It came with a side of home fries, which I DID sample, and even though home fries sound like a simple thing it's worth mentioning that Dante's Kitchen is really good at them.  I've had them overcooked, undercooked, greasy, too much seasoning, etc. etc.  but these were done right.  He also got a side of cheddar grits.  They were good too, I mean grits are grits but the addition of the cheese was an interesting twist.

My pancakes were good, and they (the pancakes themselves, topping notwithstanding) tasted different from anywhere else that I've had them.  I could be wrong but it seemed to me to be a marked lack of salt, which I feel is a VERY good thing. They came with whipped cream and some sort of caramel drizzled on them, so no syrup needed (IMHO). 

Only two things we didn't like; I'll refer back to a post Joe recently made on our Facebook page regarding servers.  When you order food, and the server says, "I love that!" or "Excellent choice" that's ok, but when you're in a crowded little restaurant and you can hear your server saying "Excellent choice" to every single customer he's waiting on, it kind of loses its meaning.  The other thing was that after our server brought our check, he kind of disappeared.  I mean, it WAS really busy in there and he wasn't standing around doing nothing, but it's kind of a pet peeve of both of ours; you were right on top of things taking our order and the food came out pretty quickly, but once we're done we want to go.  And don't you want our table for the next customer?

We liked Dante's Kitchen a lot, and will most likely go back.  The food was very good, and above comments notwithstanding, the service was good too.