Parkview Perk
8972 E. D AvenueIt’s been a while since I’ve blogged about a restaurant in Richland.
For a while it, it was an every week thing. L was taking classes at Athletic Mentors three nights a week and I would pick her up one of those nights.
Those classes got moved back to Kalamazoo about the time I had hit pretty much every spot in town for dinner while waiting for her.
There was one spot I wasn’t able to get to though because they’re a diner and would close long before I’d get to Richland around 6:00 PM.
Late last week, I was in Richland really early in the morning for work. I had met a couple of co-workers at Gull Meadow Farms for a few hours then I had some time before I had to head back to Kalamazoo. I was hungry and it felt like a perfect time to stop and get breakfast.
Parkview Perk is located in what can only be considered downtown Richland on D Avene/M-343 just to the west of N. 32nd Street/M-89. The restaurant is one of the old EMA Enterprises restaurants that was sold to an employee has EMA winded down their operations. This place had been Liz’s Parkview Cafe for many years until it was sold to a longtime server in the restaurant and a cook almost a year ago. The restaurant is hard to miss as all the buildings on this stretch of D Avenue sit very close to the very busy road.
There is an entrance on the D Avenue side but there is no place to park. Parking is behind the building accessible from either D Avenue just as it curves in front of the restaurant or from 32nd Street. The back entrance is the one most people use. You can spot it with a metal awning and a small sign next to the door.
The host stand is kind of in the middle of the restaurant. If you come in the back, you do have to kind of go almost to the front to find it. It’s a pretty large counter that separates the two dining rooms. This is also where the cashier is to pay at the end of the meal.
The layout of the restaurant is pretty much the same but there was some changes made in the decor and the design after the new owners took over. The floors got a refresh with a laminate flooring, new paint changed the color scheme from red to blue, and the furniture was updated to more neutral colors. The main dining room has a combination of booths, tables, and a lunch counter plus a view of the traffic whizzing by on D Avenue through large windows that let in a lot of natural light on the front of the building.
The other dining room underwent the same changes. This area is a little bit more compact than the open dining room on the other side of the half wall. It’s filled with booths on one side and more four tops to fill in the space. This side wasn’t really being used the morning I was there but when B and I ate at Liz’s Parkview Cafe on a Saturday morning a few years ago, this side was used once the main dining area started to fill up.
The menu at Parkview Perk is pretty much the same as it was at Liz’s. The last time I ate there, I ordered an Eggs Benedict. This time, I also ordered an Eggs Benedict. I have two favorite breakfast orders and this is the one I get the most. The Benedict at Parkview Perk is simple and delicious. It’s a classic Benedict with toasted English Muffins, grilled ham, poached eggs, and a hollandaise sauce. Instead of covering the whole plate, the sauce was neatly layered on top of the eggs. There was a good amount in every bite but it didn’t run all over the plate. The sauce also helped hold the poached eggs together so you got the good parts of the eggs without it making a mess of the plate as well.
The plate came with hash browns and these were some of the best hash browns I’ve had in a really long time. The top and bottom were both really crispy with some of that soft, pillowy potato-y bits in the middle. The potatoes were slightly salty too which really added a flavor layer to the crunchy parts that soaked up flavor from the griddle. I could have eaten just a plate of these hash browns.
The cost for my breakfast was right around $15.
The EMA restaurants were always some of my favorite breakfast joints in the area before they were sold off to employees and they’ve still been some of my favorite after the sales. I love that the company had the foresight to sell the restaurants to people who cared about them. It shows in the quality of food and in the quality of the experience. Parkview Perk is a classic small town diner where people meet up before heading out to work….just what every town needs.
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