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Collegetown's Carriage House offers great brunch and lunch, but for a price
The food is excellent and creative, such as a brie-stuffed french toast made with brioche baked on the premises, and served with a drizzle of berry coulis and maple syrup. The french toast is rich and crisp, and we love it with a side of local sausage -- on a past visit, a fresh chicken-apple sausage. The brunch menu also offers sandwiches and salads, beyond the more breakfasty items.
Coffee at the Carriage House is from Gimme! Coffee, with handmade espresso drinks and tasty brewed coffee available at all times. Be aware that unlike most breakfast or brunch eateries, the Carriage House charges for each refill of your coffee cup even after charging $2.25 for the first one -- and at $1.75, each refill is as much as most places charge for bottomless coffee. While we don't mind paying a little more for excellent, locally roasted coffee, it seems there ought to be a middle ground. Charging a premium price for espresso drinks is a bit more common, and the Carriage House does a nice job of preparing beautiful lattes and cappuccinos, complete with expert "latte art." A lunch visit featured the Carriage House burger, which we've heard raves about, and it's a fine burger made from local grass-fed beef. I loved the sundried tomato puree and grilled onions, the BBQ mayo added a nice tang, and the burger was served on fresh ciabatta.
A surprising bargain by comparison was the $1.75 bottle of delicious Reed's Premium Ginger Beer I enjoyed with my burger. Reed's Jamaican-style ginger beer is sweetened with clover honey and pineapple juice instead of cane sugar (or the reviled high fructose corn syrup), and the pineapple juice lends a smooth sweetness that nicely balances the gingery spice of the soda. You're probably getting the feeling that we think the Carriage House is a little overpriced, and when they fill up on weekends, we can't blame them for wanting to charge what the market will bear. But while we're happy to pay a premium price for premium food, we do want to feel like we've gotten our money's worth. We suspect giving customers a little more for their money would help this restaurant, which really does have excellent food, fill up on weekdays, too. The attractive Carriage House web site still inexplicably does not include the establishment's menus, though PDFs of the menus are available for downloading and viewing in the Adobe Reader software. This is one of our pet peeves; there's no good reason not to include the menu on the web site itself so that site visitors can explore the food options without downloading files, or without installing third-party software, neither of which is permitted on many computers, from public kiosks to managed corporate workstations. We love the food at the Carriage House, and the service across several visits has generally been friendly and competent, if not perfect. We'd be awarding a 4.5 rating, or maybe even a 5, if the value for what's provided were better balanced. As things stand, we'll give them a 4. The Carriage House Cafe is open for brunch and lunch Tuesday through Sunday and dinner on Friday nights. Plan on spending $10-20 on your brunch, $15-30 on dinner. Find them at 305 Stewart Avenue north of Buffalo Street or carriagehousecafe.com, call 607-645-0152, and tell them you heard about them here. |
This week the 14850 Dining Report is in Collegetown checking out the Carriage House Cafe on Stewart Avenue. We've visited recently for brunch and lunch, and the weekend brunch is when the Carriage House shines. The first-floor space in this beautifully restored 1850s building fills up every weekend, so plan on waiting a bit for a table if you come midday.
I was amused that my french toast arrived looking as though it had been dropped, with the careful plate decorations smudged together, but a friend's was still photogenic. Mine tasted great anyway.
At $12 this is a pricey burger, especially at lunchtime, but the price wouldn't seem so high if the sandwich came with fries or another side dish, rather than a handful of potato chips. (Even great potato chips seem cheesy on a $12 plate.) We'll compare to the O Burger at the now-defunct Olivia, which for their too-high $13 at least came with outstanding herbed fries and bread service for the table; or to the $9-10 burgers at the Ithaca Ale House, which include fries, a house salad, or the salad of the day. Like those offerings, this is one of Ithaca's best burgers, but at $12 for, effectively, just the burger, it's not one we'll splurge on too often.