Breakfast…If You Insist

My disdain for eating copious amounts of carbs, fats, meats, sauces and sugars the first thing in the morning is well documented. (See previous post)

Packing in proteins, breads, and fat when you first wake up (when you’re not even hungry) is the stupidest thing to do in food.

What Americans have done to breakfast (and its unholy cousin/devil spawn: brunch) is unconscionable.

You want to know how disgusting breakfast food and America has become? Just check out this list of abominable breakfast creations from a few years back.

But hating breakfast as a meal doesn’t mean I hate breakfast foods. In fact, I love almost all of them.

I love a well-made omelet, hand-made pastries, and fresh-tooled sauces. Nothing beats a straight from the oven biscuit, a couple of perfectly poached eggs, or ripe, fresh fruit. And who among us doesn’t lust for the yeasty tang of a fresh buttermilk pancake, smothered in good butter and real maple syrup?

The trouble is, you will never find any of these things in any egg-centric restaurant, specializing in breakfast. You know the type: the ones with punny names like  “Hamlet and Eggs,” “Egg’lectic Cafe,” or “Great Eggspectations.”

Egg-centric restaurants use the cheapest ingredients possible and routinely massacre them.

Dollars to doughnuts, if the word “egg” appears in the name of a restaurant, it means the chili is from a can, the pancakes are from a mix, the sauces come from a freezer bag, and the pastries all fell off a truck. And you don’t even want to think about where the eggs came from.

A correlation to this rule applies to any joint advertising “soup, salads and sandwiches” — none of which has anything fresher than the cryovac’d meat they defrosted four days ago, or the rapidly browning lettuce being served one step ahead of the health inspector.

Anyone who eats “soups, salads and sandwiches” ought to have their head examined.

But let us not belabor the atrociousness of cheap breakfast food. Let us instead celebrated the few places where wonderful food is made every morning in Las Vegas by people using top shelf ingredients and cooking them the way your grandma did:

EAT – Downtown’s mainstay is better than ever. Get the hash (pictured above). Get the posole. And by all means get the pancakes.

DELICES GOURMANDS FRENCH BAKERY & CAFE – More of a small bakery, offering a few jaw-dropping pastries, plus quiches and a crêpe or two — every one of which is wonderful. Good coffee too. The only place in town I buy bread anymore.

ROSALLIE LE FRENCH CAFE – Best. Pastries. In. Town. Period. Wonderful quiches, with serious coffee as well. (See tasty snap at top of page)

http://s3.amazonaws.com/citybuzz/2014/05/vegas-restaurants/15-restaurants-las-vegas-2.jpg

BOUCHON – The pastry basket is justifiably famous; eggs Benedict don’t come any finer, and the omelette would make Jacques Pepin proud.

Notice what all of these places have in common? None of them has the word “egg” in their name. And you’ll never find a bunch of sloshed women slugging down cheap mimosas at any of them.

I rest my case.

2 thoughts on “Breakfast…If You Insist

  1. John,

    One the same note.. I visited the Veranda inside the Four Seasons and had their pancakes. At the time, the menu said it was served with Vermont Maple Syrup. After questioning the validity of this on three separate subsequent occasions and being told that it was in fact absolutely Vermont Maple syrup by wait staff and Management… I discovered then through having the waiter retrieve the product, that they were serving a Sysco product that was 1/3 Syrup, 1/3 HFC, 1/3 sugar substitute. The same manager who previously told me that they were serving VMS then states that this product won a blind taste test over the real thing with all the chefs at the hotel. B.S… cost cutting and lying at it’s finest. I complained to Corporate and also received the usual response and finally got an apology from the hotel for a menu “typo”after being told the “taste test” response prior. Despite being an almost double decade weekly customer, I’m never going back there again. The food product at the Mandarin and Tableau blows away the junk they serve at the Veranda.

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