Blue Moon Cafe

Blue Moon Cafe
1621 Aliceanna St.
Fells Point, Baltimore
410-522-3940
Brunch
Cost: $
Reservations: weekend wait
Date of meal: Sunday, August 19, 2007 (8am)
National Price-Quality Frontier: Inside It
Baltimore Price-Quality Frontier: Inside It

I was expecting to love Blue Moon Cafe. It's a cute Fells Point brunch place and looks the part. It's full of yuppie parents and urban hipsters in equal (and excessive, they don't take reservations and we had to wait even at 8am) numbers. The atmosphere is great.

I should start with a very fixable complaint. Their web presence stinks. It's not just the lack of a web page, but there is considerable ambiguity and disagreement among other cites (citysearch, etc.) about their hours. This problem is compounded by the fact that they don't pick up the phone much and their answering machine (if they have one) doesn't turn on within a small number of rings.

The staff are obviously over-stretched and this led to sub-par service (e.g., 10 minute wait to get a check) despite the best efforts of the servers. The menu looked promising and creative (apple and bacon pancakes!!) but execution was mediocre. I had an omelette, and ingredients were of low quality and eggs were cooked badly. Toast was served with sub-par jam. My spouse's pancakes were kind of blah.

I guess all this is about right given the low prices ($8 omelettes) but given the clientèle, the neighborhood and the high prices of restaurants in Baltimore in general, I think Blue Moon would be well-served by raising prices a bit ($10 omelettes) and putting the the extra money into better ingredients and more servers. While at a higher price-point, for me Miss Shirley's is worth the extra price for brunch.