The first thing that strikes me about a restaurant is the approach, the grounds, the exterior. glo is surrounded by great public walkways, great public sculpture, and overflowing public trash cans.

I anticipate the excuse, “picking up garbage is the city’s job!” Well, the government is ruining your restaurant: Stop making excuses and busk the cans into your dumpsters.

I love the space glo is in, and hate the hip hop blasting over the front door. I’m a giant hip hop fan, but when the music is so loud it’s fuzzing your speakers you are doing it wrong.

I’d add something in the long entrance hallway as well, video screens or similar. The corridor is perfectly designed for busy waiting — don’t bore the people lining up to give you money. That said, my party was immediately seated on the patio on a sunny, beautiful, busy day.

The interior was almost empty, except for delivered cases of kitchen supplies which hadn’t been properly received littering the tables.

We were seated outside under pleasant shade, which is a neat trick. I’ve been red for a few days, first from the beach, second from a patio with poor brolly shades. Worse, however, are those patios that are over-shaded and get no sun. glo achieved a nice balance.

Then we got our menus.

Laminated, dilapidated menus with no graphic design didn’t fit the quality the rest of the establishment was aiming for. This is basic stuff: Use heavy paper with a standard design, possibly a cover, and reprint and recycle as needed.

Edifice: 2 of 5.

Our server introduced herself and recorded our drinks. My new trick has been to ask for an Arnold Palmer, which seems beyond most Victoria bartenders. She repeated the order and I could tell she had no idea what I wanted.

The server returned with an iced tea, coffee, and a question for me: “Okay, we’ve had a discussion. Some of us think an Arnold Palmer is a light beer with a shot, some of us think it’s iced tea with a shot. Which is it?”

Fail.

I changed my order — they didn’t have lemonade — and ended up waiting an unreasonable amount of time. The tea eventually showed up with a round of waters, nicely sweetened. Lots of iced tea in Victoria is over-sweet, which is confusing because Americans, our main tourist demographic, drink the stuff sugar-free.

The drink service foreshadowed the food: slow, and not quite right. The medium-rare steak in my party came medium, and our eggs benny had clearly spent some time under a hot lamp. Not only that but the English muffin — which the server called an “English McMuffin” — was burnt.

I had a chorizo goat cheese omelet with spinach, mushrooms, diced tomatoes, and disgustingly overcooked eggs: scorched rubber. The flavors and textures would have worked had the dish been properly cooked — one side effect of the excessive heat was to string out the spinach.

These cooking problems were all a symptoms of an overly-busy kitchen. Obviously a steak order takes time, and when you’re busy it might go out a touch over-done (and should then be sent back). Omelets and poached eggs take minutes, or seconds, to cook and should be done last. Even a busy person has enough time to send omelets back until they’re right.

The egg dishes tasted like they’d been started with the steak and then kept warm — unacceptable. Here’s how to properly scramble eggs, imagine your way to a properly cooked omelet from here:

None of the tables around us got food in a timely fashion. glo’s kitchen is either under-staffed, under-experienced, under-motivated, or under-skilled. Or maybe some combination thereof.

The food was served without an eye to presentation, which is disappointing because most of the dishes I saw on other tables were presented with a pseduo-haute flair.

Service: 1 of 5.

glo feels more than informal — it feels too relaxed, like the difference between a sweater and a sweatshirt.

The patio’s bamboo shades had been trimmed into uselessness and then left in place. The planters blocked isles and bottlenecked traffic. They’d been useless long enough that waiters were stepping over the boxes — so why even have them?

Combined with the trash cans, the tatty menus, the entryway speaker-fuzz, and the unstowed cooking supplies, the unthinking arrangement of the bamboo planters gave the place the feel of a restaurant without a manager. Or maybe with a tasteless one. In either case, that lack of care was reflected in the food.

That said, the space is great and the “hard” aspects of the design — those that are more resistant to a lack of care, like the building and internal fixtures — work well. And being in Victoria on a sunny day is pleasurable by default.

Ambiance: 2 of 5.

Overall, glo is fine for a relaxed time out. I feel as though I’ve panned it more than it deserves, like a nice-but-stupid dog you keep having to choke. Let’s put this review in the context of the reviews I haven’t written yet: glo is above-average for its class in Victoria.

But with a little discipline it could be so much more. It just feels unmanaged — no consistent vision, no steady hand.

Final: 2 of 5.

I’ve heard that some haters have already walked out in political disgust, so you know it’s good. As always images will hit the gallery’s site after the IRL opening.

• Email it to specific people who I think will like it
• Star it for future use in my own blog post
• Share it with people who are friends with me in Google’s social networking universe

(I wish I also had the option of posting it to peoples’ Facebook walls.) If an item is light or I just don’t have anything to say about it, I’ll share it instead of star it. For me, MentalPolyphonics is not a collection of “this neat thing I just saw” but instead “this cool idea I just had”; I don’t want my intensely cool ideas lost in a sea of throw-away macros.

But I worry that sometimes I share stuff just because I’m too lazy to wrap it in a blog post. And I know I’m providing a valuable service by filtering sites like PunditKitchen that shouldn’t be wasted on just my friends. So I’m going to try wrapping up my shared content for each week into a single post, let me know what you think.

Hope I don’t break it all…

Feel free to author away. Here’re my todos:

1) Post the Christmas message.
2) Get the old posts working.
3) Put the loglines out on our twitter feed.
4) Fix this cluttered theme.
5) Get Google Analytics back up.
6) Add ShareThis.

Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like, or if you see anything broken.

Merry Christmas.