Victoria Trip - Shine Cafe

Headed to Shine to try "some of the best Eggs Benny in Victoria". The place was packed, as usual, but a table was provided to us fairly quickly. The servers were pleasant and efficient and the service was good. We decided to order two different types of Eggs Benny and then have one of each. My husband ordered the special Xmas Benny with stuffing, yam chips and cranberry hollandaise. I had the Canadian which has brie, bacon, mushrooms and bell peppers. It was Xmas Eve so I also ordered one of their choices of Mimosas with both orange juice and cranberry. It was very good. Unfortunately, and this is a big unfortunately, I ordered my eggs cooked soft as usual and they arrived hard. There are three keys to a good eggs benedict in my books: 1) A great selection of many different types - check! Shine hits this on all fronts. They have many creative options and options that I've often thought at other restaurants why don't they offer one like this? My Canadian was excellent. I really liked that it wasn't just a big piece of bacon on the muffin like you would see a piece of ham but rather the bacon was fried crisp bite size with the mushrooms and peppers and it was perfect. 2) An excellent hollandaise - check. Theirs was great - and they offer different varieties of hollandaise as well which is just excellent including maple, roasted garlic, whiskey, chipotle, pesto and the special cranberry. Very creative! 3) The eggs MUST be cooked right. While I have seen people order their eggs hard I've never personally understood it. To me, the poached eggs must have runny yolks with firm whites. When you cut into the eggs, the yolks must run out nicely over the rest of the benny. This can be hard to do for run of the mill restaurants but a breakfast place like Shine needs to have it down pat - and, quite frankly, I think that they mostly do - I just hit the one time that they just didn't quite hit the mark. Two servers offered to replace my eggs but my husband and I had already split our plates to share the two types of benny. We happily enjoyed our meals and while we would have preferred runny eggs and it would have made the experience excellent we had no intent to send our eggs back. So, we were quite surprised, when we were advised upon the presentation of our bill that they removed not just one of our breakfasts but both. This is excellent customer service and will ensure our return visit. And then when leaving another server also apologized about our eggs. They totally get the importance of a properly cooked egg and an epic breakfast experience and strive to deliver it 100% of the time. For this reason, I will give Shine another visit in the future, and I encourage others to try it as well.