Red Eye Café

So the Red Eye Café is back in business, this time in Broad Ripple inside a former Pizza King about half a mile east of the village on Broad Ripple Avenue. It was previously located downtown, at the corner of Meridian and Louisiana, next to Union Station. I can’t say for sure why it closed up shop downtown and moved north, but I have some guesses. (Oddly, perhaps, I don’t think the recession had anything to do with it.) It opened quite a few years ago as a 24-hour diner-style place that served everything on the menu all day - both breakfast and dinner items. I heard that David Letterman even plugged it once on the Late Show.

For awhile, it was pretty solid - the food was excellent, and the service was somewhere between decent and unremarkable; but somewhere along the line, the service went to hell. The food remained excellent - particularly the omelettes and the burgers, which were made with chopped onion and garlic rolled into every hand-formed patty - but the service got way slow, and it also got to the point that they would forget something or get something wrong literally every time we ate there. Eventually they changed their hours and started closing Sunday through Thursday nights, though they remained 24-hours over the weekend. They closed down for good well over a year ago.

And now they’re back. The posted hours indicate that they are trying the 24-hour model again, except for Sundays, when they close early (like most non-chain places in this goofy Bible Belt backwater) at 2pm. They’re far enough outside the village that the weekend drunks would not automatically stumble into the place after the bars close, the way they stumble into La Bamba (or probably some other places too, but back when I used to stumble out of Landsharks or the Casba at three in the morning, La Bamba was the only choice) - so I don’t imagine that this 24-hour thing is going to last very long, especially since, on entering the place, you see at once what the big difference is between this one and the downtown version.

They have eliminated table service, which automatically elevates payroll to the top of the list of potential reasons that they vacated the downtown space. The dining area is also smaller (but more compact), which would indicate that rent was an issue downtown, too. You order at the counter from a one-sided paper menu that has some of the same offerings as the previous restaurant, though the focus here is on those omelettes and burgers - everything else has either been reduced or eliminated.

They brought the food out pretty quickly, but it’s hard to say if this was because they’ve gotten better at it or because we were the only ones there who were eating. We got there at 1:30, just half an hour before closing time, and the only other person in the restaurant had finished his meal and was taking advantage of what I assume is their free wi-fi. The downtown location had free wi-fi, too - you could even see the Airport base station hanging on the wall next to the soda machine.

Alas…it just ain’t the same. The veggie omelette (onion, green pepper, tomato, mushroom, topped with nearly melted cheese) was a little bit bland, and gooey in the middle. This may have been the tomato and onion giving off their water, but it tasted suspiciously like egg that wasn’t all the way cooked. Amy seemed pleased with her Denver omelette, though both of us got home fries (the only accompaniment to the omelettes) that looked like they had been cooked in a pan or on a griddle that had not been cleared of the carbon scoring from previous cookings. The potatoes themselves were not burned, but there were burned bits on the plate. At the previous location, you got hash browns and toast with your omelette - and the omelette was far more substantial than what is on offer now.

They seem to be most focused on the omelettes now; and while not necessarily a bad thing, it also means that they are lining themselves up to compete directly with Petite Chou and Three Sisters for the omelette crowd. And friends and neighbors, that’s just crazy talk. Petite Chou is a little expensive for my taste, and Three Sisters can be slow - accurate, and super friendly, but sometimes slow - but it’s well worth it at either place, because the omelettes are amazing. I prefer Three Sisters because it’s a bit less expensive and the rickety old house it’s situated in ratchets the atmosphere up to eleven. Either way, Red Eye Café, in its current incarnation, doesn’t even come close to competing with either of those other two places.

1904 Broad Ripple Avenue
602-5500
redeyecafe.com