Forget the 60-degree eggs and rarefied plates of potato hash (aka home-fries) and strut instead into a place like Stone’s Café and Bakery, a happy-go-lucky breakfast and lunch joint that’s held its own for years along Route 115 in North Yarmouth.
I went there this morning just in the mood for a stick-to-the ribs sort of Sunday breakfast. The place was packed, and I got one of the few empty stools at the counter. The two blackboard specials were biscuits and sausage gravy with eggs and home-fries or baked beans with eggs, home-fries and toast.
Black specials including drinks and desserts
I’ve had their baked beans before, and they were fantastic: thick, beany, just sweet enough but still a savory stew.
The waitress serving me was a young college student who helped me decide which special to order. “If you love biscuits—ours are homemade–I’d go for sausage gravy over biscuits,” she advised.
Sausage gravy dishes are just too heavy, even the best ones, so I chose the beans and eggs. There’s a lot more than these two dishes on the menu, typically pancakes (which are pretty good), French toast, omelets of all stripe, thick as mud oatmeal with fresh fruit, among many choices. Stone’s, if anything, is a typical home-style family diner found everywhere in Maine.
Sausage gravy over biscuits, which I’ve had at other visits and enjoyed when it was under different ownership; great home-fries, too
After a half hour wait, my breakfast was MIA. Another 20 minutes later and it finally arrived. I could have left and returned from shopping at Shaw’s in less time.
The bowl of bean, beans over the eggs and the first plate of eggs, toast and home-fries without the beans
The plate, moreover, looked as forlorn as faces at a funeral. I ordered scrambled eggs with my beans, and if they were 2 beaten eggs for scrambling, they must have been cracked open from pullets. This was the tiniest portion of scrambled eggs ever. The home-fries were chunks of red-skinned potatoes, some a little too undercooked but nicely flavored. Usually breakfast dishes like this are accompanied by two pieces of toast. There was only one slice, which was as hard as a crouton. The puny portion of eggs were way overcooked, and my neighbor’s poached eggs over corned beef hash, incidentally, were as firm, he said, as hockey pucks.
Diners online waiting to get in for breakfast
I nearly finished the breakfast before the beans finally arrived in a cup. I had inquired if they would be coming soon when the waitress served me the breakfast dish without the beans, and she said that a fresh batch was being made.
What? I thought. Wouldn’t that take half a day for fresh baked beans to arrive from the pot?
No, she informed, they were being reheated.
Stone’s was for sale and it sold in July, about the third or fourth owners since the original family ran the place, which I first went to about 20 years ago, loving its down-home style of cooking.
Thirty miles from Portland round trip, it’s a hike to get to Stone’s especially for a seriously mediocre breakfast. The one saving grace was the beautiful fall display of red, yellow and orange leaves till on the trees, making for a scenic drive through Cumberland Center.
Young staffers are quick and attentive even if the kitchen is slow; and patrons run from families to stylish
I won’t go again now that The Purple House Bakery down the road opens next. It was the former owners of Stone’s who thought the Purple House revered for chef owner Krista Dejarlais fabulous Montreal style bagels and masterful pastries was cutting into their business. That would be like comparing fresh air to a cpap.
Nah, not having a good short-order chef in the kitchen may have been their problem (and still is). I mean, I’m not asking for a menu of edible butterflies or a plant-kingdom menu of earthly delights. Just give me good diner food and I’m happy. Though you wouldn’t know it at Stone’s. Business is booming there. But I wondered why I saw so many half-full plates cleared from tables and being scraped into the garbage bin!
