The Waffle Shop, which is on the northwest corner of Highway 49 and French Bar Road in Jackson, is one of those “greasy spoon” restaurants that my mother and I like to go to for breakfast or brunch every so often. My mother had a few days off from her infant and toddler daycare business early last week, so we decided to pick up brunch on the early afternoon of August 17.
Finding The Waffle Shop menu online required me to search for the restaurant on Google, but the restaurant has a Google Business listing with a link to their website. The website is for Sunrise Waffle Shop in Rancho Cordova, but the PDF-format menu available on the website applies to the Jackson Waffle Shop as well.
My mother called The Waffle Shop in the late morning, placed our order, and gave the person on the phone her card information. I arrived at the restaurant about 25 minutes later. I saw one person was sitting under a covered tent in the parking lot outside the restaurant eating his meal on a very warm day.
I entered a darkened restaurant and noticed I was the only customer. A helpful man at the front counter greeted me promptly. He processed my order at the register and gave me a plastic bag stacked with Styrofoam containers.
My Meal
I ordered the Light Omelette from the Healthy Choice section of the menu. This omelet has Egg Beaters, turkey sausage, chopped tomato and onion, and feta cheese. The Waffle Shop happily accepted my request to leave off the cheese. This omelet also comes with fruit and your choice of toast, and I chose an English muffin.
When I opened the Styrofoam container, the omelet didn’t look like an omelet at all. It looked like scrambled eggs with turkey bacon and vegetables mixed in. The eggs were slightly overcooked from the browned appearance, perhaps because they were Egg Beaters, but the imitation eggs still tasted like eggs. The inch-long slices of turkey bacon was a bit chewy but still had the right amount of salt and meat flavor. The tomatoes and onions were flavorful and added a nice kick.
The toasted English muffin came sliced and buttered, and they also came with a small Smuckers plastic packet of strawberry jelly that you find on the tables of many diner-style restaurants. The butter was completely melted, but by the time I bit into my first slice, I found the muffins had cooled. I didn’t want to wait for the muffins to warm up in the toaster, and so I ate through a chewy muffin because there was plenty of bread inside the crust and toasted flat edges.
The large helping of fruit included sliced honeydew melon, sliced cantaloupe, and whole red grapes. There were a few seeds that came with it, but not so many that I became annoyed getting them off the melon slices. The fruit itself tasted like what I would find at the nearby Raley’s: soft, firm, and with enough flavor to know what I was eating.
Mom’s Meal
In the past, my mother would always purchase a waffle because it’s The Waffle Shop, of course, and she likes their waffles. This time, she ordered French toast, which she hadn’t eaten in many years.
Her Styrofoam container included four large half-slices of bread, butter in one lidded container, and two lidded containers of maple syrup.
The bread had plenty of egg coating and was cooked evenly. What’s more, the bread was thick and evenly sliced, so it could easily handle the butter and maple syrup my mother put on it. My mother told me she could taste the bread along with the crispy edges.
Some portions of the thick crust included egg batter that added a thin layer of extra crispiness. Even so, my mother said that the crust was crunchy but not chewy, and made for a satisfying end to each slice.
The Verdict
The Light Omelette is one of several omelets I’ve had at The Waffle Shop, including the Popeye’s Omelette, which is made with egg whites, and the Veggie Omelette, which is made with whole eggs. This was the first time I ate the Light Omelette, and I think it’s good enough to add to the group of omelets I’ll consider ordering the next time we eat there.
My mother was quite pleased with the French toast and ate every bite, though she saved some of the butter and maple syrup for her frozen waffles she ate for breakfast later in the week. She was so happy that she said she would probably order French toast at every meal at The Waffle Shop from now on.
Green light from both of us.
The total cost of our meals was a little under $23.
Want to Try Them?
The Waffle Shop serves breakfast, brunch, and lunch items, including burgers and sandwiches. They’re open from 6:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. daily. You can view the menu on their website, and then order by phone at 209-223-4888 or using DoorDash.
Amador Business Ticker food reviews are adventures in local dining with Editor Eric Butow and his mom.
