With Family Day in the near past, many families find themselves wondering which restaurant would be a suitable destination for Mother’s or Father’s Day plans. The age old dilemma when it comes to eating out is finding a restaurant that keeps everyone satisfied with their meal, and it is often hard for everyone to agree on a restaurant where they get what they want to eat, especially in larger families or when dining out with extended family. Luckily, many prominent chain restaurants are quite suitable for this purpose; they offer a range of choices so that there is no need for compromise when it comes to meal time.
One such restaurant is Ricky’s All Day Grill, which offers an extensive breakfast and lunch menu, both until four. For breakfast, Ricky’s offers all the breakfast classics: pancakes, omelets, eggs Benedict, “brekki-bowls,” while lunch selections include salads; soups; burgers and sandwiches; pastas; steaks; pizzas; and other entrees. The dinner menu has many choices included on the lunch menu, along with the addition of fish and a limited selection of “all day breakfast” foods.
One interesting brunch selection is Ricky’s “Brekki-Bowl”, a dish featuring “breakfast potatoes with sautéed peppers, onions and seasoning, topped with 3 fluffy scrambled eggs, a trio of cheeses, diced fresh tomatoes and green onions, all smothered in ranchero-hollandaise sauce.” The Chorizo Brekki-Bowl came with chorizo sausage mixed in with the rest of the fixings. While the hollandaise was absolutely average, the chorizo sausage was very good, with a hint of spice, but not to the extent to overwhelm the dish. The quantity of chorizo was also impressive considering the size of the dish, and for the price they were not stingy with the meat they provided. That being said, the apparent lack of peppers and vegetables in general was quite disappointing, as it would have not only made the dish more nutritionally sound, but also more flavourful and varied. That being said, the dish was very satisfying, due to the variety of foods combined together in the bowl, and it’s size was perfect, filling without being excessive. The breakfast bowl in itself is an interesting form of breakfast food, one that is not particularly common in the brunch world, besides at Calgary’s Over Easy, which hosts a category on their menu titled “Box’d” which boasts their renounced, “Soul in a Bowl” Poutine. While a noval form of breakfast dining, the breakfast bowl is a hearty meal that boasts a variety of ingredients, certainly a new class of breakfast all together.
A notable choice for lunch are the sandwiches, such as the Grilled Chicken N’ Bacon sandwich,which came loaded with white chicken breast, rather than “beefed up” with unnecessary, and cost reducing, stacks of bread. Soup or salad is offered as a side, and the Signature Tomato Basil soup which was selected was phenomenal. The flavour and spicing was spot on, and as a whole, the soup was almost as good as home-made.
The atmosphere and esthetic appeal of Ricky’s was lacking, their decor was dated and could use some modernizing, but on the whole this made little impact on the dining experience as the food itself was quite enjoyable and the service good.
Overall, Ricky’s was better than one might expect a chain to be, and the dining experience was impressive, compared to the mediocre expectations of excessive cost reduction and copious amounts of salting. While not comparable to gourmet restaurants or independent businesses that offer unique dining experiences, the quality of Ricky’s food was comparable to that of Earl’s, yet cost less.
