I decided to take the boys out for breakfast this morning, which just raised the eternal conundrum: how do you find a good breakfast on the weekend that isn't a long, uncomfortable wait to get into?
No other meal has this problem. Yet breakfast is famous for it. Name any well-known good breakfast spot, from traditional spots like Walker Bros., Lou Mitchell's or Nookie's to trendoid hangs like the Bongo Room, Flo or Orange, and on Saturday and Sunday morning they will all have lines going out the door. Indeed, the crowd at a famous breakfast place can often support TWO restaurants, the one the people came for and the place they try, a few doors down, when the line just seems too much for them. (For instance, does anyone come directly to Brett's for her-- perfectly likable by the way-- brunch and basket of breads, or is all her breakfast business supplied by people who set out to eat at Kitsch'n and Victory's Banner?)
Conversely, who would dare eat at a breakfast place that wasn't packed to the gills on Sunday? Wouldn't you suspect that the locals all know that the chef just went to jail for grinding his ex-wife into the Jimmy Dean sausage or something, and that's why they aren't there? The few times I've tried it-- as at Corner Grille a few weeks ago-- the other problems, like inattentive service, quickly validated the wisdom of the initial judgement. (Actually, that was for lunch, but still-- I assume noon in Andersonville is the break of day for a lot of locals, and the strangely underpopulated restaurant on a busy hipster strip should have been a sign.)
And yet, what are we talking about when we wait in line for hours? We are, too often, talking about the Nissan Sentra of meals, a practical, utilitarian feast whose highest high and lowest low are just not that far apart on the culinary scale. No Trotter or Achatz has reinvented breakfast with dazzling combinations or feats of technique or fresh ingredients; toss some ratatouille and a dab of goat cheese inside an omelet, as they did at Bistro Campagne last Sunday for brunch, and you win the prize for exoticism, for pushing the envelope. (It was really good, by the way-- maybe the best thing I've had there.) Of course, one reason for this is that breakfast hasn't been mucked with as much as other meals. No Alice Waters is needed to bring fresh ingredients back to a meal consisting of two eggs over easy and some fried potatoes, with a slice of canteloupe on the side. (Though McDonald's' new McGriddles, in which a muffin or whatever is genetically modified to have a maple flavor, suggest a hideous dystopian future for breakfast's simplicity.)
The reality is, many of the so-called great breakfast places are just competent, even some of the very good ones-- like GWiv's beloved Edgebrook Diner-- impress more for refusing to screw the standards up than for achieving something eyeopening. I have trouble thinking of very many breakfasts I've had that genuinely impressed me with novelty and imagination-- that omelet at Bistro Campagne, the corn cakes with red pepper sauce at Wishbone, unusually sprightly eggs benedict with spinach in them at Flo come to mind, but not much else. Yet any place with even a decent reputation packs them in like French Laundry.
Take where we ended up this morning. Sweet Maple Cafe, on Taylor Street, a place that used to get a lot of mention on that other board but not much here as yet. I suspected it would be a popular hangout and so we were there not long after 8; even so we waited a half hour, and by the time we were seated they were quoting an hour. The boys shared big, malt-y tasting pancakes, very satisfying to judge by the bite I stole; I had biscuits and gravy, and was impressed by the big fluffy biscuit but deeply unimpressed by the too-spicy but almost flavorless gravy, which I took as a badly failed experiment in yuppification by removing what belongs in the gravy (sausageness) and adding what doesn't (a faux Cajun spiciness). Oh, and pretty good home fries, almost indistinguishable from Wishbone's.
Despite the fact that my main dish was an almost total waste of the carbs, I can see that this is a pretty good place with a ramshackle college-town charm you don't see much of in Chicago. But look at the price-- shlepping to little Italy, standing in a cold drafty foyer for half an hour or more waiting for a table like a hawk, sitting at a table for half an hour under the hawklike gaze of others as a cold draft chills my food-- and it is hard to see any logic (other than the LTHForum try-everything-once logic, I guess) by which it was worth going there for what we had. It would have made more sense by far to simply whip up breakfast myself; for one thing I'd have been finished with it a good hour earlier than I was. So again, I must ask the question: Is breakfast worth the bother?
Sweet Maple Cafe
1339 W. Taylor, Chicago
(312) 243-8908
Last edited by
Mike G on October 2nd, 2004, 3:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.