The Review Reviews: Lou’s

Taylor Swiftboat wakes up at 5 a.m., as he is apt to do. (Despite his young age, Swiftboat has decided to adopt a sleep schedule most popular among those over the age of 70. The Dartmouth Review still has trouble understanding this absurd tendency.) He knows it is going to be a tremendous day, for he is having breakfast at Lou’s, an establishment that has already contributed to his large and expanding waistline. Given that he has at least two hours to kill before breakfast, he catches up on Donald J. Trump’s latest speech over a hot mug of decaffeinated Earl Grey tea in his freezing dorm room.

Sir Loyn of Béf, on the other hand, frequently has much trouble waking up in the morning. After a night of hard grogging on a Wednesday night, Sir Loyn inevitably felt like merde at 7 a.m. Fear not however, for he had heard a legendary tale that Lou’s was the best cure for a “headache” in all of Hanover. Sir Lyon then proceeded to texted Swiftboat to delay breakfast until 7:30 a.m. Swiftboat, anticipating a moderate delay, arrives at Lou’s fashionably late at 7:31 a.m. But despite Swiftboat’s foresight, he could not have predicted the complete apathy of his compadres throughout the course of the meal.

Winnie the Pooh also happened to have woken up with quite the headache, forcing him to reconsider whether he should even get out of bed or eat that day. However, the appeal of a meal away from FoCo was too great. Shedding his blankets, Winnie somehow managed to throw on some clothes and meet Sir Loyn.

Sir Loyn and Winnie stumble down Main Street Hanover, weak in body and almost clear of mind. When they reached the establishment, they found Swiftboat waiting impatiently outside. It was 7:32 am. They entered as a team.

The wait was almost non-existent (thank the Lord Phil Banlon), and the boys were seated quickly. They are seated at a nice, roomy booth wide enough to comfortably support Swiftboat’s girth. While Swiftboat expected a lively and invigorating discussion in the cold of a New Hampshire October morning, his compatriots were near catatonic and most definitely hungover.

The choice of a meal was an easy decision for Sir Loyn, he wanted the most bang for his buck. Fortunately, Lou’s has a special called “the Big Green” specifically created for situations like this. The meal costs $13.95. This feast consists of two eggs in any style, a choice of pancakes or french toast, two sausages, two strips of bacon, and toast or potatoes. Sir Loyn, feeling a bit rambunctious, went with the cruller French toast, which consists of two homemade doughnuts done up French toast style. He highly recommends it. For his drink, Loyn ordered copious amounts of water; cheap enough to satisfy his budget and easy enough to drink so that if his will were to fail him, he could potentially start taking bites of the french toast down like pills in order to finish the meal. (While luckily this did not happen this time around, it has actually happened before and may happen again). It was the perfect storm, and Sir Loyn was ready for it.

Sir Loyn’s head danced with visions of savory, sugary toast as he waited patiently. When the food came, he was ecstatic. The French toast, as expected, was godly. Unfortunately, Loyn could only finish one and a half doughnuts because of the sheer weight of the unwieldy things. Each bite was a four square inch chunk of fried dough that seemed only to expand in his stomach. The problem was that, in order to keep saving the taste, Loyn decided that it would be a good idea to take rapid-fire bites and enjoy the plate to its full potential. Five minutes later, this meal was one of the best breakfasts that Sir Loyn had had in his entire life. (One breakfast of huevos rancheros, eaten on the edge of a balcony of his own private villa in a jungle in the southwest of the country Belize on a sunny and temperate morning, may have narrowly taken the cake). While Sir Loyn was too full to eat anything besides the crullers and the eggs, he wants the readers to be assured that the rest of the meal was equally good as he has eaten the other aspects on previous occasions. The sausage was obvious fresh and bursting with taste and the bacon (as bacon always is) was crispy and delightful.

Swiftboat samples a small portion of Sir Loyn’s meal, and he concurs with prevailing assessment. Most notably, Swiftboat, who loves eating excess carbohydrates and processed meats, strongly approves of Lou’s potatoes.

For his own meal, Swiftboat orders a strawberry milkshake. He knows he shouldn’t, but the taste of diabetes and heart disease is just too much to think about—Swiftboat was on a swift road to a heart attack—so he lets his mind go blank (this happens too often) and orders it anyways. The delicious shake, full or artery-clogging goodness, arrives speedily. What impresses Swiftboat initially is the sheer size of the milkshake; it’s yuuuuuge. After probing the milkshake, he is further impressed with the taste, thickness, and overall sugar coma inducing quality of the milkshake. It is essentially ice cream just fluid enough to flow through a straw. Swiftboat’s blood sugar spikes.

While sipping his milkshake, Swiftboat has troubling deciding what to have. Eventually, he settles on the cruller French toast, essentially three giant donuts done like French toast, which was recommended to him by Sir Loyn. It is described as “glazed crullers dipped in seasoned egg batter, grilled to a golden brown, and lightly dusted with powdered sugar.” He eagerly awaits his meal.

Unfortunately, by the time that his cruller French toast arrives, he is already quite full, courtesy of the humongous milkshake. He is immediately intimidated by the three large doughnuts. Nevertheless, for the sake of our readers, he decides to jump in and take a few bites, adding a dash of sweet syrup to the crullers. Targeting them one by one, he attacks the food with a fork and knife. The crullers are everything that he expected. They are sweet, but not overwhelmingly so, considering that they are lightly sprinkled with sugar rather than dipped in frosting. The preparation process has mercifully reduced their donut character while increasing their French toast character, retaining the best characteristics of both breakfast foods.

The soft and fluffy texture and the large size of the crullers make them meaningfully better than regular French toast. Swiftboat, a man of high gastronomical standards, is impressed. Despite his excitement at his meal, he barely makes it through one cruller. The sheer volume of the milkshake was too much for him. Defeated, and after many jests from his two companions, he asks for the rest of his meal packed up to go.

His headache fading rapidly, Winnie ordered several coffees as an appetizer. He followed that up with a malted Belgian waffle, served with whip cream and strawberries, with a side of thick-cut bacon. To top it all off, Winnie was advised by Swiftboat to order a shake, which he did in chocolate flavor. The meal was delicious. The waffle was cooked just right, which is to say lightly crisped on the outside without being overdone, while the whipped cream and strawberries were perfect complements. The bacon was also wonderful; it is very thick, making it an obvious choice for anyone who disdains the wafer-like meat substance that passes for bacon in many establishments.

At this point, the excesses of last night and the cruller doughnuts caught up with Sir Loyn. As his stomach started to rumble, he immediately started to regret every drink the night before. Before the other two men knew it, Loyn was excused from the table and swiftly making his way down to the bathroom. This trip, once completed, was followed up by another two more effectively putting Sir Loyn out of commission for the rest of the morning. The cloud, however, did have a silver lining. In the bathroom, Lou’s had posted a menu from around the time of its opening (1947), with prices and all. For example, pancakes 50 cents, milkshake, 10 cents. This make Sir Loyn smirk while cursing the direction this democracy was going in, and adding ammunition to his ever more reactionary arsenal of political argument topics. After a good twenty minutes in and out, our hero made it back to the table and his fellow patriots battered, but still clinging on.

Satisfactorily stuffed himself, and his associates fading rapidly, Swiftboat decides to call it a morning. Beaming at his sullen and half-asleep friends, Swiftboat wishes them well and heads off to Silsby Hall for his economics class.