Mmmm…Hof Brau! Honestly, I had never been to a Hof Brau before, but I tell you I can’t wait to go back. It seems like it was years since I visited (in actuality, it was 5/6/2010…a post-Cinco de Mayo meal…and since I’ve been really bad about eating breakfast lately, that’s dead on…it was a post-Cinco meal!). The restaurant itself is warm and inviting, dark and decorated in a deep red and rich dark woods, with photos of the area on the walls. You can get an idea of the restaurant’s look and feel by the first picture in the series (a slight deviation from my norm, but I didn’t get a good “entrance” picture…and I like to mix it up to keep the excitement levels high with my readers!) I had a pastrami sandwich on a kaiser roll—I’d never had thick-sliced pastrami before, but it was goooood. I also had some mashed potatoes and cottage cheese…both were good and fresh. My eating companions had corned beef with mashed potatoes and vegetables and a corned beef sandwich with mashed potatoes…the potatoes were a hit! The restaurant was pretty full, not too shabby for having missed the 12 PM lunch crowd.

So onto the bathroom…to be honest, I expected something as grandiose as the restaurant. I was sorely disappointed! The bathroom was clean, but super-boring. They had an ad in there for Sam’s Hof Brau free Wi-Fi (which is pretty cool). That and the door were it. Bathroom was pretty standard, light colors with white tile; looked like it had seen better times. Sadly the economy isn’t booming right now, because I think a bathroom overhaul, getting it closer to the restaurant itself, would be great. However…Sam’s prides itself on providing good food at a relatively low cost…and the bathroom is very much what you might expect an older restaurant to be, where they don’t put a lot of emphasis on bathroom design. Finally, taking into account that a great deal of the patrons are senior citizens (at least when I went that seemed to be the case), it’s likely they’re far more comfortable in a “normal” bathroom…and at the end of the day, making sure the clientele is happy is what matters most! Three rolls for an average bathroom.

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When I first saw this place from the outside, I turned to a friend of mine and said, “Look, Tomatobee’s!” The “dancing tomatoes” around the building reminded me of the Applebee’s chain, and for a few minutes, I figured someone had pulled a pretty good satire off and called their restaurant Tomatobee’s (somehow that’s not quite as inviting as Applebee’s…). I still fondly refer to this place as Tomatobee’s, and every so often will take the forty-five minutes to an hour it takes me to get to Yuba City to grab a bite here. It’s Italian fare, I’m not sure how authentic it is, but I do know it’s tasty. A couple friends and I visited 3/19/2010; we started with the antipasto plate and I had the chicken parmesan. The others ordered Pasta Ka-Boom and Pasta Arrabiatta…I’m not opposed to spicy food, but given the opportunity for gnocchi or chicken parmesan I’ll take it every time (in that order). As you may have noticed by the decidedly American spelling, this isn’t going to be high-end Italian, but it is good food.

The bathroom was pretty standard, clean, mostly white, with a touch of red and green (kinda like the Italian flag, leading me to believe the color selection was specifically for that). The Dancing Tomato in picture #4 has horns and a hat (he’s a beefsteak tomato, of course), is on the door into the bathroom (designating “men’s”), and is just one of probably a half-dozen or so Dancing Tomatoes throughout the restaurant. Three rolls for the bathroom plus one-half for the beefsteak tomato.

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Let me, for the benefit to  start by saying if I were to be labelled a “fanboy” of anything…Mercedes-Benz would be one I’d be close to being guilty of. Exotic cars in general, but Mercedes has a special pull for me…I’m not sure if it’s my German heritage crying out to me or just something about them…I couldn’t put my finger on it, but hey, they make some pretty cool cars. Anyway…disclaimer aside, here goes… (btw…I was here 2/23/2010)

This has literally gotta be one of the coolest bathrooms I’ve ever been in. If it were in a Honda or VW or Ford or Kia or any other car dealer (despite Honda’s near-stellar reputation, I’m not a fan…I like Ford trucks, their now-defunct Excursion, and they did probably the best job of any company of renewing the retro side of the pony car-era with the new Mustang…VW owns Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, and Bugatti, so there’s some love there, and truthfully, although it took me a while, I like the New Beetle…I still wish it were a rear-engine configuration, but oh well)…I would feel exactly the same. No joke…this bathroom is cool! The first thing you notice when you walk in is the TV screens built into the mirror (see picture #5) and right above the urinal (see picture #1). I’m not sure if there are TV screens in the stalls, I didn’t check. Ironically, as you can see in pictures 4 and 5, the channel was on CNN, where James Lentz, President of Toyota USA, was discussing before a Senate panel the issues Toyota was having with sticking accelerators (some of those stories turned out to be fake). Finally, in pictures 6 and 7, you can see the sink they had in there. I tried to capture how the thing worked in picture #7, but it didn’t come out very well…anyway, there are no sinks per se. This is a solid slab of granite sloping toward the mirror, with a trough running behind it that collects the waste water and soap. The sink heads are automated and start when you put your hands under them (pretty standard).

For all the cool stuff in this bathroom, I’m giving it four-and-a-half rolls. “But, Bathroom Guy,” you might be asking yourself, “why only four-and-a-half? Why not five?” Let me tell ya, pardner! I’ve seen some amazing bathrooms on the web and in person (for some reason more when I was a kid than now…hmm). Although this bathroom is really cool, it can’t compare to the bathrooms in the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo for orginiality or design, and as I remember them, some of them are five-roll bathrooms).

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I last visited Dillian’s on 2/15/2010. The food is standard bar & grill food, I had a steak sandwich (which was fantastic btw) for lunch. The service was pretty quick (there were five of us total), the food served hot (and plenty of it!), and they were showing UFC and NFL highlights on the flat screens. Dillian’s is dark inside (as you’d expect a corner neighborhood bar to be) and is pretty much your standard bar from a decorative standpoint. They have a covered enclosed patio, separated from the main area, to allow smokers to enjoy a cigarette or cigar with their drinks or food. It’s probably been ten years since I’ve seen a “smoking” section, and I thought it was pretty cool they had it there.

The bathroom was not at all what I was expecting! Honestly, I was expecting dark and dingy…instead, it’s pink and white! The stalls are gray, and they have their upcoming events on the mirror. This is a clean bathroom and comes recommended (come for the bathroom, stay for the food!).

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