Phantom Gourmet: The Friendly Toast
BURLINGTON (CBS) - Take a look around The Friendly Toast and it's easy to see this place is a bit different.
"It's a very unique dining experience," owner Eric Goodwin says.
"You see these paintings where you're like that's kind of creepy, but it's kind of cool," Chef Jarred Bailey said.
"We have portraits of women. Some animals. Fifties advertisements. It's hard to really pinpoint what it is because there's so much going on," manager Staci Pinard says.
With five New England locations and counting, including the Burlington Mall, The Friendly Toast is a restaurant that lives up to its name when it comes to the service and the food.
The eye-catching dining room is decked out with hundreds of signs, tchotchkes, and outlandish decor around every corner.
The menu is filled with all kinds of creative breakfast items, available morning, noon and night.
"Friendly Toast is an all-day breakfast extravaganza," Bailey explained. "We have dinner stuff, we have lunch stuff, but we definitely specialize in not your average breakfast items. It's great."
Chef Jarred Bailey does the cooking here. Eric Goodwin owns the place and Staci Pinard runs it. And together, they've created a spot that's a feast for all your senses.
"It's not just the food. It's not just the atmosphere. It's a combination of all things combined," Goodwin says.
Of course you are here to eat and there are all kinds of options.
Like omelets and scrambles, outrageous breakfast sandwiches, indulgent pancakes, benedicts, burgers mac and cheese and more.
In fact, with more than 70 items on the menu, choosing exactly what to order can be difficult.
"Most people have a very hard time deciding," Pinard says.
But deciding what to drink is actually pretty easy, just opt for something called the Mimotional Wreck.
"That is a sampling of four of our mimosas," Pinard says. "You have a grapefruit mimosa, an orange mimosa. We have a pomegranate one on special. It's good if you want them all, which most people do."
And from the drinks and décor, to the food and mood, it's easy to see that The Friendly Toast isn't your typical restaurant.
Pinard says, "A lot of restaurants take themselves very seriously nowadays, there is a time and a place for that, but you can really come here and just let loose, have fun, forget about whatever else you've got going on and just have a really good meal in a fun environment."
The Friendly Toast also has locations in Cambridge, Boston's Back Bay, Portsmouth, NH and Burlington, VT.