Here’s what operators are buying and cooking up for their breakfast customers.
Grilled Sausage, Egg & Cheddar Panini
Atwood Café, Chicago
“Hotel guests drive our breakfast business,” says Heather Terhune, executive chef at this restaurant in the Hotel Burnham. “They’re looking for more unusual items and they don’t mind paying more.” Terhune recently began buying cage-free, organic eggs and eventually hopes to use them exclusively. For her panini, she cross-utilizes sourdough bread and cheese from lunch.
Pecan Cinnamon Raisin French Toast
Brooklyn Diner, New York City
The large breakfast menu here features a “Before & After the Gym” section with healthy egg white omelets and organic buckwheat pancakes, but “Tony Bennett’s” Pecan French Toast is the top seller, says Chris McCormack, manager at the Times Square location. The kitchen buys about 400 eggs and 50 pounds of bacon each weekday; weekends, that number doubles.
Blueberry Almond Crepes
Rosewood Country Inn, Bradford, New Hampshire
Breakfast is a big deal at this B&B, where owner Lesley Marquis makes everything from scratch daily. “I do my buying locally and what I get on Monday is used on Tuesday,” she explains. Blueberries appear on the menu in several guises; when fresh are not available, Marquis uses frozen. Since the inn hosts many vegetarians, bacon and sausage are not as popular.
Roasted Pear, Spinach & Gorgonzola Omelet
Cloud 9 at Senator Inn & Spa, Augusta, Maine
“I put as much emphasis on breakfast as other meals,” says chef Brian Sawyer. This omelet incorporates a healthy dose of winter fruits and vegetables, but he also does more decadent Eggs Benedict variations, using a pasteurized liquid egg yolk product for the Hollandaise. Sawyer is increasingly turning to local organic free-range eggs.
California Scramble
Black Bear Diners, Mt. Shasta, California-based
With 36 locations in the West, this chain likes to impart local flavor to breakfast items. “The California Scramble is extremely popular—many of our customers prefer veggies over meat in their eggs,” says Sherri Degraffenreid, contract administrator. From a fresh potato supplier, she sources two custom products—thicker, strip-cut hash browns and diced red potatoes for home fries.
This is the best chicken you can eat—nice and spicy, honest food just like you would have on the islands of Trinidad or Jamaica. The chicken comes on plastic plates with sides like yams, corn, black-eyed peas and rice and beans. A whole jerk chicken dinner comes to about $8.
Selected by: Marcus Samuelsson
Chef-partner, Aquavit, merkato 55 and Riingo, New York City
Hugo Liu wants to change the way people think about food. But unlike
most foodies, Liu is an expert in computational linguistics. Working at
MIT’s Media Lab, he created “The Synesthetic Cookbook.” The database
includes 60,000 recipes that are tagged with 5,000 keywords for
ingredients and 1,000 descriptions, which include both culinary
descriptors—spicy, sweet, etc.—and more abstract words such as
comforting, melodic and pensive. Plug a few of those words into the
database and you’ve got yourself a recipe for Sad Oatmeal (various
spirits, plus wine, soda and, presumably, oats) or Poetic Pizza (a
crustless pie). Looking for something Caribbean-ish? The search
function just might concoct your next nightly special.
Hugo Liu wants to change the way people think about food. But unlike
most foodies, Liu is an expert in computational linguistics. Working at
MIT’s Media Lab, he created “The Synesthetic Cookbook.” The database
includes 60,000 recipes that are tagged with 5,000 keywords for
ingredients and 1,000 descriptions, which include both culinary
descriptors—spicy, sweet, etc.—and more abstract words such as
comforting, melodic and pensive. Plug a few of those words into the
database and you’ve got yourself a recipe for Sad Oatmeal (various
spirits, plus wine, soda and, presumably, oats) or Poetic Pizza (a
crustless pie). Looking for something Caribbean-ish? The search
function just might concoct your next nightly special.