The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Sully's

This quest is really starting to take its toll.

It seemed like a harmless idea several months ago, maybe even a fun idea - to scour the Valley for great french toast and report back to you, the great big world, about what I found. Along the way I'd learn something not only about french toast (with respect to which, I may modestly assert, I'm becoming quite discerning), but also about the place I was living. It would be an excuse to peer into the many nooks and crannies into which the great, diverse masses wander in search of breakfast and coffee and conversation, a way to touch the Valley's soul. I have, it's true, been amply rewarded for my troubles. I have learned much, I have traveled widely, and I have eaten some very good french toast.

But I have also seen shit that would turn you white.

First there was my diner juggernaut, which culminated in that traumatizing visit to Kathy's. Several weeks later, I still wake up in a cold sweat after dreaming about the sickly, crusty slime that I ate there. Lately, I'm even finding myself unable to take pleasure in pure, simple things - a child's laughter, a kitten drinking from a bowl of milk, a baby clinging to her mother's shoulder - without a sudden vision of Kathy's french toast flashing before my eyes (and nostrils) and reminding me of the evil of which this world is capable.

Now there's Sully's, a place I had long been dying to visit, enticed as I was by the sign on Route 9 that advertises the place as "The Home of Polish Music." "Polish music!" I thought, "This place must have great french toast! Ooh, I wonder if it's Polish french toast! Whoopee!"

Oh, gentle reader, how wrong I was.

The first thing that strikes you on entering Sully's is the distinct lack of Polish music, or, indeed, of anything that might indicate that Polish music ever has, or ever will be, performed there, much less would make its home there. The menus - blue rectangles of unlaminated construction paper dappled with stains from long-ago meals, stains so severe that they render whole sections of the menu utterly unreadable - contain not a whiff even of Polish food, other than a side of kielbasa that you can order with your meal, if you dare. There is, it's true, a photograph of a local band hanging on one wall, though there is nothing about this photograph to suggest either a) that the band is even remotely Polish, or b) that it has ever played at Sully's.

The next thing that strikes you about Sully's is how old everything is. Not good-old - like, say, Istanbul's Galata neighborhood - but bad-old, like what happened to the cheese you inadvertantly left out on the counter before you went off to Istanbul for a week. Along one wall there hang large, faded yellow banners celebrating the sporting triumphs of the Hopkins Academy soccer and softball teams between the years 1979 and 1983 (said academy, incidentally, has recently been spotted with a "For Sale" sign posted on their roadside marquee). Above the counter there hang photographs of children who are probably nearing retirement age by now. The floor is covered in ratty carpet abundantly splattered with dark stains and covered with large crumbs, some of them approaching crouton size. The menus, as already noted, are in dire need of a good disinfecting. The decor, such as it is, is a hodgepodge of knicknacks of the sort that you usually find in the "free" box after a yard sale, the centerpiece being a large bass - the fish, not the musical instrument - mounted on a plank hanging on the wall and looking for all the world like it's going to escape out the back door.



The setting, then, was less than auspicious, but still we (Kate, the poor dear, was with me) decided to make a go of it. Intrigued by a faded handwritten sign advertising potato pancakes, we ordered some, thinking that this might add a bit of Polish flavor to our breakfast. In the same spirit, I also ordered my french toast with a side of sausage, thinking that it might, in fact, be Polish sausage. Not a bit of it. The sausage was two black hockey pucks of standard breakfast sausage, and the "potato pancakes" were, in fact, hash browns molded halfheartedly into three flat, uneven discs.

And the french toast? It was certainly a notch or two above Kathy's, but that is faint praise indeed. There was no powdered sugar, the syrup was corn syrup, and overall there was little of what might be described as flavor. But that's not necessarily a bad thing - if the ambiance was anything to go by, the less flavor one encounters at Sully's, the better. It could easily have been much, much worse.



And so the search for The Perfect French Toast beats on, a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into my belly.