Eeeewwww!

This morning, we all went out for brunch at Chester's, a new restaurant in town.

Alex and I both chose the delicious-sounding buttermilk pancakes with roasted apples, which was advertised with the accompaniment of "real maple syrup."

When our plates arrived, the pancakes did indeed look fantastic. However, sitting next to them on the plate was this:



Alex and I looked at each other in horror. I picked one up with the tips of my fingers and inspected the ingredients list. Corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, water, natural and artificial flavor, salt, caramel color. (Perhaps the "maple" part was somewhere in the natural or artificial flavor?) There was no way—absolutely no way—that we were going to eat this abomination.

The next time the waiter came by, I asked if it was possible to get actual maple syrup to accompany our pancakes. To his credit, he looked confused, apologized, and said, "I definitely punched 'real maple syrup' into the computer, let me go see what happened."

Several minutes later, he returned, even more apologetic, and said, "the kitchen told me that that is the real maple syrup." We assured him that it was not (he agreed), then declined the offer of some sort of banana-maple syrup that he promised did actually contain maple.

Brynna started screaming at this point. We are convinced that this is because she was also horrified at this travesty. I assured her that I would not be subjecting her to any second-hand breakfast syrup, and she recovered herself.

Now, I will note that the breakfast was overall very tasty, and the apples added enough sweetness that no syrup—real or fake—turned out to be necessary. In addition, there is a complementary free mimosa with Sunday brunch.

But seriously, people. When you advertise real maple syrup, what you give people should actually be real maple syrup.

Which looks like this (if you're like us and ship it from Vermont by the half gallon):


And contains only...drumroll please...maple syrup. In fact, it doesn't even have an ingredient list, because the only ingredient is right there in the product name!