Thursday, October 18th - Breakfast at the Yacht Club Gacky, er, Galley a/k/a Jay and Benda Succumb to Disney Dining Hubris.
Lookie there - we've made it to a new day!! It's another miracle!
Before I start, I'd just like to offer a piece of advice based on my dinner experience this evening ... if you can call what I've been eating "dinner" ... don't pour whisky into a cut glass tumbler while watching from above; if you're anything like me you'll misjudge and over pour with the result being a half-tumbler full of 10-year single malt Scotch whisky and nothing but a hot pretzel and some dipping mustard to soak it up in your belly.
Your Lush Quotient (LQ?) is pretty high, I'm suspecting.
This evening's whisky by the way is Glenkinchie Single Malt Scotch, 10-Year. We were first introduced to this at the Scotch & Food Pairing at the Rose and Crown which you will all get to see in a later installment. It has a pale gold color with a light aroma, similar to the sweet scent of freshly cut grass in the springtime. It's a little dry, but overall very good and a very accessible whisky to people like me who are new to this kind of booze. It does not taste like burning!
I never knew that one could have Scotch without the burning!
Tonight Only - A Free Case of Jaundice with Every Picture!!!
Call me silly, but I thought modern photography had progressed past the point when the victims, I mean subjects, looked like they were suffering from a liver ailment.
ROFL! Serves you right for having the tanning gene! I'm convinced that you caught a bad photo moment because the flash reflected badly at the tan bouncing off of you and Jay.
Ahem...
Enough about that, let's to breakfast!
I have to admit, we went off plan today and I think that's why breakfast was wonky. Our original fabulous 10-day itinerary drawn up 67 different ways over 8 months by yours truly called for us to have a light breakfast in the room followed by a couples treatment at the Mandara Spa. We would finish there with just enough time to clean up and get to the Grand Floridian for afternoon tea. Sounds like a great way to spend the day, don't you think?
Yeah, me too, until about 20 hours ago.
I love going to the spa and I adore Mandara, which is not located anywhere remotely close to the armpit of the Midwest, but we had visited them in October 2006 and again in May 2007 and I just thought that we'd be better off using that money for something else.
And that something else was a bottle of Sam Adams Utopias that was gone forever by the time I went back to the Festival Welcome Center to purchase it for my handsome hubba.
Gone, all gone...
Never again will I cancel a spa appointment in order to purchase a $200 bottle of booze.
Next time we'll buy the damn booze the moment we find it and then go celebrate at the spa!
It's that same thinking that cost me the festival shirt I wanted. Luckily, someone was able to find the shirt in my size and pick it up for me.
Anyway, that convoluted thought process is the reason we ended up over at the Yacht Club Galley for breakfast instead of at the Mandara Spa for a couples massage and a dip in the whirlpool. In years past the Galley has always provided a good breakfast with both a buffet and menu option. The place does a brisk business but has never been so packed that we've even had to wait for a table - we've always been seated immediately and that was the case on this morning as well.
Well, I had breakfast there a scant two days later, and we had to wait 30 minutes for a table, mid-morning on the day we left. I never had to wait for a table there before.
Ordering breakfast here has always been really easy for us: cafe mocha, giant Mickey waffle, a side of snausages, a monster omlette, and some water.
I usually go for the buffet...and that trip was no exception.
Our waitress took our order promptly and Jay and I sat in drowsy silence, waiting for the chocolate, caffeinated joyful jolt that is cafe mocha at WDW.
And then it showed up ...
I looked at Jay, who was already taking a sip from his cup, and said, "What the hell is this?"
"What?"
"Since when is cafe mocha served with foam?"
And by calling it foam I'm being generous - it looked like someone had scooped scummy dishwater soap into both of our cups. It was actually grey ... like dirty snow.
I tasted a quick spoonful and made a face. "That's a latte - there isn't even any chocolate in it. What does your drink taste like?"
Jay took another sip and then said, "Runny hot chocolate - I think someone forgot the espresso."
"That, or between these two drinks we're supposed to make our own cafe mocha, whipped cream be damned!"
Ewwww. That sounds disgusting. I never did get to try the mocha, and by the sound of your experience, I got off lucky.
We waved down another waitress because ours had vanished - maybe she was looking for Juan Valdez - and told her that our drinks were incorrect. This young lady was very nice and agreed as soon as she looked at them that we'd been given the wrong beverage. She swept them from our sight, promising to bring forth the drink we had ordered as quickly as possible.
And then our waitress showed up, looking highly affronted.
"Those drinks were correct."
"I beg your pardon, but they weren't. Cafe mocha is served with whipped cream not foam. And there wasn't even any chocolate in my drink."
"I made those drinks on the machine in the back and they're right."
"Well your machine is either broken or you don't know how to make a cafe mocha."
This continued pointlessly for another 30 seconds with the waitress insisting that cafe mocha had never been served at the Yacht Club Galley the way I described it.
What a lousy server. If I were the manager, I would have made a beeline to your table to cut off the blabbermouth in her tracks to make things up to you.
"You know what - we're not drinking those things that you brought us. Just give us a pitcher of that stuff you call coffee and we'll drink that instead."
How do I say...your coffee... it is like swill to us. Am I saying that correct? Only a swine would drink this?
Oink. We ordered the carafe of swill with our breakfast, too.
This next picture is a cafe mocha we ordered at the Yacht Club Galley in October 2006. Don't ever forget what it looks like and don't ever let someone tell you a mocha doesn't include whipped cream or chocolate syrup. Note the oversized cup, the generous mound of whipped cream, the drizzle of chocolate syrup ... this is a cafe mocha!
From the coffee archives: YCG October 2006
Yes. This is the picture I remember. The picture that made me think I could order one of these babies (but completely forgot about doing so).
We added plenty of milk and sugar to our swill and it wasn't long after when our breakfast was plunked down in front of us without so much as a "Hope you don't choke."
Giant Mickey Waffle - it would taste better with a mocha
Three Egg Omlette
It just wasn't a very good morning. Maybe our taste buds had been influenced by the cafe mocha spat, but nothing really tasted as good as we remembered from past visits. Mickey was too dry on the inside and no amount of maple syrup could help him - it was like chewing on cardboard. And even Jay said that his omlette was off - unevenly cooked and kind of bland.
Bummer. I liked the buffet offerings, for what it's worth.
A disappointing experience all around, but I guess Jay and I were due for a bad repeat experience at some point and time. I'm not going to recommend this restaurant any longer but I'm also not going to warn people away from it. We could have just ended up there on a bad day, but based on this most recent breakfast Jay and I have decided that we're steering clear of the Yacht Club Galley or the Captain's Grille or the Purveyors of Not-So-Fine Drinks or whatever their new name is for the immediate future. It's obviously time for us to take a break from each other.
And the funny part is, we didn't have a female server. Our dude was very strange. He would make all sorts of jokey comments that only he must have thought was funny. We found him a bit odd, but harmless.
The good news is that this was the worst meal of the entire trip, so things definitely improved from this point forward.
If that was the worst meal, count yourself lucky!
Hey, before I stop for the evening would you like to see some of the really cool birthday gifts I was given by my DIS friends?
Excellent!
Cass and Rob gave me a birthday pin that has a viewing window with different Disney characters and birthday scenes. She remembered how much I like pins that move!
It spins!
And then because she knows what a boozer I am ... she brought a bottle of wine from a Canadian winery. We drank this and it was so good - a light, crisp white wine that went down really easy. And I love the wine carrier - isn't it great?
Cheers!
And then ... as if that wasn't enough. She also remembered how much Jay likes to collect Hard Rock Cafe pins and brought him three awesome ones; two from Ottawa and one from Montreal!!
We're in geeky pin-collecting heaven!
My mysterious friend AFEG and his family also brought me a birthday gift - a gorgeous blown glass wine stopper. The best picture I could get of it was once we were back home and it had been put to use.
Look at the colors!
Thanks as always for reading - next stop will be the Gardenview Lounge for afternoon tea. Start working on extending those pinkies!!
Wow, nice gifts! I especially like the wine stopper, but hey, they ain't Toblerone!
On a completely unrelated note, I had a fortune cookie to open. It read: "A good deed will make you feel good." What kind of stinky fortune is that?? TDC Nala told me that I didn't get a fortune cookie. I got a sermon cookie! Hmmpf!
Seriously hilarious...snort laugh worthy even!!! Maybe it was the French spelling...or something...
I was about to post that! 
Pretty, pretty please? 
