I have a personal question for you. You don't have to answer out loud, but I want you to be honest with yourself. You like, really like, Egg McMuffins, don't you? It's OK. I won't tell anyone, but I can offer you a way to hold your head up high again. The McRick: a handmade, flour-dusted yeast roll surrounding a succulent sausage patty, a fried egg dotted brown with bacon drippings, and bright orange cheese ($6). Served with golden brown, crispy home fries, the McRick is sublime, and it will make you forget all about that guilty roadside indulgence of yours.

The McRick is only one of many good reasons to find your way to Food at Fishers Station on the outskirts of Victor. There are, for instance, the pancakes. And the muffins. And even the toast. Located in a non-descript green ranch crouched in a scrubby stand of pines on the edge of an office park near the Thruway, you might well miss Fishers Station - unless you see the cars lining the road on weekends and stop in thinking that it might be an estate sale. If you do stop, you are in for a real treat once you've survived the mosh pit around the front door and secured one of the restaurant's handful of tables. Be prepared to wait.

Nancy Stewart, half of the husband-wife team that owns and operates Fishers Station, won't seat you until your whole party has arrived (and don't try to fake her out, either, she'll know). Nor will she take reservations. "Everybody waits," she told me on a recent Sunday as the rush was finally tailing off. "I don't care if you are Hillary Clinton. I don't care who you are, you get to wait in line like everyone else."

The wait is worth it, but be prepared to order when one of the restaurant's harried wait staff circles by your table. On a Saturday a couple weeks ago, it looked like there were only three people, including Nancy Stewart, working the floor and watching them navigate the tables and crowds with hot plates and even hotter coffee brought to mind a combination between ballet and slam dancing. Amazingly, it somehow works. Food arrives quickly, it arrives hot, and unlike restaurants with much larger staffs, Fisher Station's waitresses somehow keep everyone's orders straight without having to ask, "Who gets...."

If they ever did ask that question, my answer might well be "Me!" You could order at random off chef Richard Stewart's compact breakfast menu and never be disappointed. A 1981 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, Chef Stewart's menu is straight-up comfort food - the kind of thing your grandmother would serve you if she just happened to have a culinary degree and almost 30 years of cooking experience behind her.

Almost everything that the Stewarts serve is made from scratch. Richard and his kitchen crew make all the bread (including those amazing yeast rolls) for the restaurant, as well as all the muffins and other baked goods. It's hard to get me excited about toast, but Stewart's raisin bread was so good that it didn't even need butter to dress it up. They make their own jam - a rich and fruity ruby-colored raspberry recently, although I suspect they change it up from time to time. My wife was so fond of the pumpkin-pecan muffin with its crust of sugar sprinkled across the top, that she asked me to get her the recipe.

Richard Stewart might give you his muffin recipe, but I suspect he'll take the secret of his pancakes with him to the grave. Described as "meltaway" pancakes, it appears that the chef has figured out to the micron exactly how little flour he can put in a pancake batter and still have it hold together. They are almost as thin as blintzes, but far more moist and creamy, walking that thin line between substantial and merely heavy, but ultimately settling in the realm of perfection. The chef serves them with a tiny pitcher of real maple syrup, but butter is really all they need. And they really do melt in your mouth (short stack $4.50, full stack $5).

For over the top decadence, order the pancakes as part of a two-two-two plate (one of the recurring specials, $6.50): two eggs, two sausage patties, and, theoretically, two pancakes all stacked together on a single plate. My most recent two-two-two plate had at least four and maybe as many as six 3" pancakes stacked up under eggs and meat - more than enough to share so that I could get a crack at my companion's omelet and some of her home fries.

It really says something about a restaurant when the weakest items on the menu are still wonderful, and that's certainly true of Chef Stewart's omelets. Closer to frittatas than traditional omelets, the "fluffy jumbo omelets" at Fishers Station are indeed huge and full of tasty ingredients. The spinach and cheddar omelet ($6) was a particular delight - the greens just wilted, the cheese forming gooey pockets in the fluffy eggs. Still, it was the toast, wheat this time, that we ended up fighting over.

Finally, a word about one of my favorite subjects: bacon. As a rule restaurant bacon tends to fall into two categories, incinerated or nearly raw. The ability to get it exactly right - crispy, a lovely mahogany brown color, with just the right balance of salt and fat in each bite - takes patience, skill, and an innate sense of when the bacon is ready amid the whirl of turning out as many as 200 plates on a Sunday morning. A chef who can do that, make amazing bread, and still be home in the evening to make dinner for the family and help with homework is clearly a man to be admired and reckoned with.

Food at Fishers Station

7548 Main St, Fishers | 742-3280

Wed-Thu 11 a.m.-2 p.m., Fri 7 a.m.-2 p.m., Sat 7-11 a.m., Sun 7 a.m.-noon