The sun rises from the East. Another lovely day in Central Florida.

Must be time for breakfast.

We visited Rise and Shine at 20430 East Pennsylvania Avenue in Dunnellon on 29 January 2011. We’ll drive hundreds of miles for breakfast. We’re that kind of dedicated.

A special treat today: Favorite Guest Reviewer Mom is with us. You know a beautiful young mother of two is hungry when she’ll give up sleeping in on a Saturday morning so she can go have breakfast.

The savvy Tampa Bay Breakfasts reader is feeling odd. Feeling like all this has happened before, maybe in a parallel dimension of time and space. Well, your feelings are well founded. Rise and Shine recently replaced Local Legends, which we visited back in March 2010.

For being more-or-less a breakfast-themed place, we found the menu to be sort of short. Not bad, just one page of large type and the first reaction was “short.” The other side of the menu was lunch.

If this were an album cover for Mötörhead, I’d be Lemmy.

Mom and Marek and me, we got some coffee.

We got Ivo ready for the conveyor belt of food he requires. Yesterday he ate a jar of food. The whole jar, it wasn’t even open. It was just sitting on the high chair tray, I turned to get a spoon, and it was gone. The metal lid was hanging out his mouth and he was munch-munch-munching away like a goat.

This is Marek. His hair is turning darker. Soon, time will ravish him like it has his old man. But for now he’s still a cute little kid.

Breakfast came for Ivo early. And I know you’re all jealous, but I paid extra for this haircut. And now I wear Lightning McQueen t-shirts. I used to wear Mötörhead t-shirts, but then I had kids.

Breakfast came on time for Marek, Andy, and Mom I’ll get to everything else in a moment, but I can’t hold out on this: These home fries were the worst I ever had, there, I said it and I feel better.

Marek put the kung-fu-grip on some bacon before teaching a pancake a lesson.

Favorite Guest Reviewer Mom had some French toast. She did not, however, say, “Oh lah lah, mon petit dejunes.” So it wasn’t really all THAT French. She got grits for Ivo, but he was ambivalent about the concept.

While I was busy setting up the above shot, taking an Ansel Adams approach to composition and framing, Ivo yoinked my pancakes.

Who likes to ham it up at breakfast? Mom does! Mom does! You’d expect Marek to be saying “take my picture dad!” But it’s all mom doing that.

Ivo gets a top-off of baby-juice. That would be pancakes, bacon, eggs, and milk, blended together. As you can see, the inside of Rise and Shine is shiny, clean, and doesn’t look at all like a sports bar.

What do you do after that kind of breakfast? If you’re Ivo, you just turn out the light and take a nap.

After we have breakfast, we usually have the Tampa Bay Breakfasts review pow-wow. Here, Mom, Marek, and Ivo are discussing the finer points of yoink.

The bill came. $22 and change for two large breakfasts (with an extra plate to split with Marek) is OK. Not super-cheap, but not terrible. Excepting that we’re in Dunnellon, not Tampa, so I’d sort of think it could be a little cheaper.

Marek paid the bill and came back with change. Note for the record books, today is The Day, the first day in two years of breakfasts, that Marek said for the first time that he was keeping some of the money. He gave me the bills and shoved the coins in his pocket. “What are you doing, Marek?” “I need money to buy a parachute, dad.”

A parachute.

No kidding, that is what he said.

And while he’s doing that, Ivo’s sucking a lemon. You probably have two questions going through your mind: “What?” and “Hunh?”

We wrapped up this morning’s breakfast and headed out to visit grandparents. The pancakes were quite good. The eggs were really wonderful, the strongest point of the breakfast. Bacon was OK, but odd, with some pieces slightly overdone and some slightly underdone, like the oven was unbalanced. Favorite Guest Reviewer Mom was not in love with the French toast (“mais, nous ne parlon pas François”). Marek seemed happy enough.

But the home fries.

Let’s be serious for a moment. I eat Army food on a sort of regular basis. It’s actually really good and tasty and well-prepared these days so that doesn’t count. I also eat bachelor-chow when I’m by myself at home, which consists of expired corned-beef hash poured on top of a $2 frozen pizza and washed down with Pabst and Tabasco. I went to many heavy metal concerts in my youth, and so my taste buds aren’t what they used to be. I give everything at least a few bites, “just in case” a taste-problem is me. I did not try a second bite of these homefries. I don’t like to disparage food, especially breakfast (heck, I don’t even complain when I’m sort of thinking we’re going to get shot at when we have breakfast in the hood in Tampa), but this was Not Good. I could have complained and sent it back, but with two kids we simply don’t have time for that sort of thing. These boys are like hand grenades where you pulled the pin and started counting and then got distracted by some Lady Gaga song and lost count — you don’t just sit around waiting for new homefries or you start getting kid-shrapnel flying.

Rise and Shine, you’re doing OK as a new breakfast place, but the home fries need some serious QC. We give the Rise and Shine a Tampa Bay Breakfasts three-pancake rating.