Uncle Ernie’s Pancake House
4005 Portage StreetHow the hell is my kid in high school?
I was just thinking the other day how long I’ve been writing this blog. It started when J and I had really just started dated and we moved to Lansing. She got a job there and I hated my job so I moved with her. The first restaurant we went to in Mid-Michigan was The Nuthouse and it’s still one of my favorite Lansing restaurants.
I’ve mentioned so, so many times that I treat this blog like a journal. Our entire history of life in Michigan is on the thousands of pages on this blog. There’s our engagement, our wedding, our move to Kalamazoo, and of course, the birth of our children.
It’s wild to me that our oldest is starting high school.
This past Monday was high school orientation day at Loy Norrix. I dropped her off at 9 AM and had some time to kill before registration began at 11 AM (that’s a whole other story). I figured I might as well go get breakfast.
I started to head towards Portage. There’s a couple of places there that I haven’t been to yet but it just seemed so far away. I turned back around and headed towards a place I haven’t eaten at in close to fifteen years.
Uncle Ernie’s Pancake House is on Portage Street in Kalamazoo in a small shopping plaza between Paddington Street and Banbury Road. The restaurant has been a staple of the Kalamazoo breakfast scene and the Milwood Neighborhood is the late 1950’s. It sits in the middle of the shopping plaza with a large red sign that’s hard to miss as you’re driving buy on the busy Portage Street.
The last time I can remember going to Uncle Ernie’s was way back in 2010 not long after we moved to Kalamazoo. My parents were in town for the weekend and we got up early to eat. I remember really liking the place but there are so many breakfast places in Kalamazoo that we wanted to try we just never worked our way back there when we lived in Candlewyck.
The restaurant was pretty busy for a Monday morning. There were a bunch of linemen eating breakfast before heading out for the day. There was a sign to wait to be seated by the door so I waited until one of the waitresses saw me standing there.
The restaurant is essentially one large dining room. The last time I blogged about this place it was before I started taking a lot of pictures so I really don’t remember it. There is a mixture of tables and black leather booths. The color scheme is pretty muted with a lot of greys and blocks. The restaurant is lit by fluorescent lights in a drop ceiling. It’s not the usual bright, airy decor of a breakfast joint but the place has a real homey feel to. The waitress took me to a booth along the wall between the waiting area and the dining room and set down a menu while she went to get me a Pepsi.
There are really two things I order at breakfast. It’s likely going to be a Eggs Benedict like I ordered at Parkview Perk just a few days earlier or it’s going to be Steak and Eggs like I ordered at Uncle Ernie’s last time I ate there.
This time, it was the Steak and Eggs again.
The plate is a 6 oz. grilled sirloin, two eggs, hash browns and toast.
I started with the eggs to get them out of the so I’d have more room to cut the steak. I got the eggs over medium so they came out a little bit runny but not so much that the yolk oozed all over the plate.
Hash browns were next and I must be on a lucky streak with hash browns. I wrote in my blog from Parkview Perk that those were the best I’ve had in a long time. These were right up there too. They were nice and crispy on the top, light and fluffy but all the way cooked in the middle and had just enough seasoning that I didn’t need to add anything. I love it when I get good hash browns and this was two breakfasts in a row that I did.
It was finally time for the steak and man, even this steak was delicious. I literally expect nothing when I order a breakfast steak. Some are alright. Some are bad but they’re still steak. This one was really great. It’s a nice thick piece of meat that was cooked right to medium rare. I had a great salt and pepper seasoning crust that gave this steak so much flavor without needing the offered steak sauce. I was honestly a little shocked at how good this steak was…especially for the price.
The last part of the meal was toast. I picked the Texas Toast so it was just one thick piece of bread toasted and buttered. It worked as a great palate cleanser.
It took quite a while for the waitress to come back with my check after I was done. A different server cleared my table and it was probably another ten minutes before my server dropped off the check.
Then, when I got to the cashier, their computers crashed as she was trying to run the card of the guy in front of me. They didn’t really know what to do. Luckily, I had enough cash. That almost never happens but in this case, I just handed her $30 and told her to give me back $5. The meal cost just a little over $20.
Little hiccup at the end but the meal was really good. The steak was delicious as were the hash browns. I always say my expectations at breakfast are pretty low. It’s hard to mess up breakfast food. I’m always blown away when some places goes above average but keeps their prices reasonable. That’s definitely Uncle Ernie’s.
SW Michigan Dining 