For 25 years, homespun wisdom and delicate eggs cradled in silky butter were the order of the day at Mama’s Cafe in Pratt, KS. Mama once applied her direct loving touch to each dish hand-carried out to an adoring audience of regulars and passers-thru of an idyllic Main Street.
Today, Mama’s Cafe is half-owned by her horse’s ass of a daughter, sleepy with obvious brain damage and an uncategorical inability to apply heat to ingredients in any meaningful way. Somehow, Mama’s Cafe still claims the best omelettes this side of Satan’s taint, a destination nearly as palatable as CAA’s wretched pus pit of villainy in Century City.
While this may have been true in the blissful days before the fetid rot of nefarious minds like Mama’s daughter’s dolt of a husband clogged all the pores of Pratt, one taste of the misnamed Denver omelette in a recent visit proves that not even the latest shameful attempts at breakfast can bring life back to a limp kitchen run by an Isiah Thomas-type charlatan. The only thing Denveresque about the meal was the mile-high disappointment.
The waitress, a poor everywoman born and raised in Pratt and forced to scrape by on tips while fat cats like Mama’s brood and her witless groom soak in the moderate profits of the trade, screamed for help with her eyes while bringing me complimentary milk. The milk, likely extracted unwillingly from a cow molested daily by an inbred Leon Rose of a man, tasted of dairy fat and shamed bovine.
A source close to the cow ruefully added, “Moo moo moo [expletive] moo moo.” Indeed.
Mama’s son-in-law, a calamitous deviant with all the influence of Worldwide Wes on his thin stretch of Main Street, decimated the nearby hardware store and the florist with his guttural instinct for empire-building and his Neanderthal skill at maintaining a business. Now he has crushed the menu at Mama’s through cheap chicanery intended to extract every dime from an unwitting populace.
The Southwest omelette is now accurately named because the customer receives one-quarter the meal he once did. The scrambled eggs offer so much torture on a plate that their overly airy preparation clearly involves beating the eggs, the hen, and a nearby basset hound. And the Eggs Benedict? Only LeBron would call them his favorite meal.
The chef, having joined the kitchen six years ago at Mama’s request before she shuffled off to the Shady Thomas nursing home not entirely of her own choice, has tried his best. He once composed a meal of competent measure, though never up to the standards of Mama’s best. However, meddling in the kitchen by Mama’s boy-by-law has reached genocidal level, killing an entire class of meals in Pratt with an angry and overfull fist of salt and venom.
Those hoping for a return to Mama’s home cooking should save their shekels and schlep their broken dreams down a few streets to Homestead Ave. and the new Proski’s Diner. The food isn’t much better, but there’s more of it and I have total access to the kitchen, so I’ll probably write about it more.
