If you are like me, you really look forward to breakfast foods. One of my favorite foods of all time is omelets. I fell in love with them when I had to cook them perfectly. You do not know eggs until they are done right. So when I took my daughter to The Broken Yolk Cafe in Mission Valley for her birthday, I was planning on letting her eat eggs and cheese (her two favorite foods of all time). Seeing the long line to get in made me happy; if there’s a line they must be doing something right… right?

The decor was cute. Much like IHOP but a little classier. Exactly what I thought it would look like.

We get seated, check out the funny egg shaped menu, I get the Border Benedict with steak poached eggs on corn cake, with poblano sauce and hash browns. My little girl orders scrambled eggs with cheese, and fruit. We get nutella banana crepes to share.

They bring my daughter some juice, thankfully with a lid. I get some watery coffee.

I notice it’s taking a while for our food to show up. People who ordered after us are already chowing down on decent-looking omelets. As my child starts singing loudly and fidgeting from waiting, I ask the server how much longer it’ll be? He looks at his little card and asks, “Didn’t you finish and pay already?” I laugh thinking he must be joking. He waits for an answer… NOO we would have left if I had paid. Duh…

I see him look panicked and run to the kitchen. As always, the cooks have to save the server.

He comes out with our food and just disappears before I can ask for some ketchup for my kid. My plate is a mass of sauce that tastes like tomatillos thrown on top of very hard poached egg, and bland dry cornbread with soggy hash browns. The little one has some fruit, her scrambled eggs burnt and runny. Very disappointing.

I grab the busser to ask if he can find my server; we switch out her eggs for sunny side up. They were burnt. I ask them to switch mine to their top dish: breakfast burrito…. Really, how lazy… Yet still dry with cold potatoes. The Nutella crepe was good.

You do one thing Broken Yolk: breakfast. Five dishes and four of them bad — the only decent one had chocolate — and that one would have been better at IHOP. Thank you Broken Yolk. I should have cooked for her myself.