Aside from April Fool’s Day, it’s during April that we celebrate National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day, National Shrimp Scampi Day, National French Toast Day, National Blueberry Pie Day, National Prime Rib Day and – perhaps most iconically – National Eggs Benedict Day, which happens April 16.
That’s because April is also the beginning of the Sunday brunch season, which seems to reach its height on Mother’s Day in May. And is there any dish more closely connected with Mother’s Day than eggs Benedict?
It’s not a dish I grew up with. For those of us raised in a blue collar, working class neighborhood, even the term “eggs Benedict” was little known. My first impression of it was as a dish eaten by moms who wore white gloves in public, and had veils on their hats. (Indeed, women who wore hats from milliners – a word that’s as forgotten as those veils on the hats they created!)
For Mother’s Day, I’d take my mom out for pancakes and waffles – down-home chow a world apart from what was nibbled at fancy destinations of the day, with names like Schrafft’s and Patricia Murphy’s Candlelight Restaurants. (Seriously! “Candlelight” was part of the name!)
I can’t remember the first time I had eggs Benedict. But I do recall being struck by how messy such a fancy dish could be; when those poached eggs broke open, they spread all over the plate like a living thing. And of course, as ever, like many iconic dishes, the roots of eggs Benedict are foggy at best.
A Wall Street stock broker named Lemuel Benedict claims to have invented it in 1894 at the original Waldorf Astoria location in New York – at Fifth Avenue and West 34th Street, where the Empire State Building now stands – as a hangover cure. But it’s also been credited to Commodore E.C. Benedict. And to a regular, named LeGrand Benedict, at Delmonico’s in New York.
There sure are a lot of people named Benedict out there who apparently like their eggs atop muffins with smoked meat and hollandaise sauce.
And, of course, as ever, the original has evolved over the years in ways both tasty … and bizarre. Eggs Benedict is served over avocado toast. The Canadian bacon is substituted with salmon, both smoked and not. In the case of Eggs Balmoral, haggis replaces the bacon. Eggs Blanchard replaces the hollandaise with bechamel. In Eggs Chesapeake, crab cakes are substituted for bacon. Eggs Cochon are popular in New Orleans, where the meat is smoked pork “debris,” and the English muffin is a buttermilk biscuit.
Eggs Florentine adds spinach. In Eggs Hebridean, you’ll find black pudding. Eggs Omar might just as well be called Steak Benedict. Eggs Trivette is made with Creole mustard and crayfish. Eggs Woodhouse? Artichoke hearts, black truffles and beluga caviar. Eggs Zenedict uses toasted scones and vegan peameal bacon. Huevos Benedictos calls for chorizo and salsa. Irish Benedict is made with corned beef. And New Jersey Benedict unthinkably replaces the bacon with a Taylor Pork Roll. I’ll bet someone out there is making Eggs Spamedict. Why not?
Here in Southern California, we can find eggs Benedict old style … and new style. I haven’t come upon one mixed with sushi – probably because I haven’t been looking hard enough. In any case, here are some of my favorites…
The Benediction by Toast
Puente Hills Mall, 17501 Colima Road, City of Industry; 626-225-3642, www.thebenedictionla.com
The Benediction by Toast, which also refers to itself as a “social eatery,” is an American breakfast restaurant on steroids – a re-creation of our many breakfast-only old-timers with a very 21st-century spin. It’s a crazy concept, and crazy good too.
If you show up on a Sunday, expect a wait for a table inside or outside on the patio, for The Benediction has found an audience of locals hungry for breakfasts of Brobdingnagian proportions.
This is not a restaurant where you go for a small bite, just something to cut your morning hunger. The food here overflows the plate, filling every inch of space with eggs, spuds and, mostly, hollandaise sauce over English muffins. There’s more on the menu than 13 eggs Benedict variations, but that’s the dominant dish.
They must make their hollandaise by the truckload here – and they make it very well, not too unctuous or heart-stopping in its texture and taste. Hollandaise can be a sadly abused sauce, hard to make by amateurs. But these are hollandaise pros … with a serious Benedict obsession.
The Benedicts at The Benediction are both perfectly made – and crazy creative. There’s a Classic, made with hickory smoked shoulder bacon. There’s one made with corned beef hash, and another with lobster. The Santa Barbara has Norwegian smoked salmon, capers and red onions. There are two surf and turf models, both with lobster and steak. There’s one where the hollandaise is replaced with Béarnaise.
There are a trio of sort of vegetarian versions, one with grilled crimini mushrooms, one with tomato and spinach, one with broccoli and asparagus. (Vegetarian, that is, as long as eggs are still part of the diet. And butter, too.)
From there, the menu meanders into big piles of more or less standard breakfast joint chow, though the kitchen can’t seem to resist putting a twist on whatever it can. Thus, there’s a three-egg Spanish omelet, made with peppers, tomatoes, onions, Monterey Jack and Tillamook cheddar. And a Super Spanish that’s the same – except it’s also built with six eggs (a half dozen, for the luvva Mike!), bacon and portobello mushrooms. Extra jalapeños too.
There are also Spanish omelets with filet mignon, and with chicken breast. But what appealed to me even more were the four twists on avocado toast – which is kind of the healthy living version of the Benedict, for those who just don’t want the egg yolk and butter of hollandaise running around in their bloodstream.
Avocado toast also has murky roots. It may have been created at Bill’s Restaurant in Sydney, Australia. Or at Café Gitane in New York. Or a drugstore counter in Los Angeles in 1937. Or in Chile in the late 1800s. Since avocado used to be called “the butter of the poor,” it was probably used as a spread long before that.
Whatever the source, it’s a California standard these days, usually done just one way. But at The Benediction (of course), it’s served with heirloom tomatoes and garlic salt, with three eggs and bacon crumbles, with Alaskan sockeye salmon, and with a cucumber salad and red onions. As long as there’s avocado and toast, it’s avocado toast. Though I do like the notion of bacon. Crunchy!
And should you not want breakfast, The Benediction is open for lunch, though the choices are finite – a couple of salads and a trio of steaks. But then, I’ve always believed there’s really no reason to eat breakfast only for breakfast. Eggs Benedict for lunch? Why not? Sounds good for dinner too, though that’s not when they’re open.
Popping Yolk Café
119 W. Main St., Alhambra, 626-940-5822; 88 W. Colorado Blvd., Old Pasadena, 626-345-5161; 15840 Halliburton Road, Hacienda Heights, 626-330-6767; www.poppingyolk.com
With a trio of branches – stretching from Old Pasadena on the west and Hacienda Heights on east, with a stop in Alhambra – Popping Yolk Café has been in the forefront of the madcap breakfast and lunch fad that’s made dinner seem just a footnote in our culinary day.
After a meal at Popping Yolk, any further food seems not just a non-necessity, but something to make your cardiologist wash his hands of your potential lifespan. Trust me: After a Nashville Hot Chicken Benedict for breakfast, more food is an exercise in gluttony. (Not that I’ve ever turned another meal down! But then, it’s my occupation!)
This is not to say that you can’t find an old school breakfast on the menu at Popping Yolk. It’s at the very top, the Classic Breakfast, a choice of “juicy” scrambled eggs or eggs sunny-side up, with bacon and sausage, a salad of greens and tomatoes, country fried spuds and toast. It’s a perfectly fine feed. As is the ham and cheese omelet, and the “crunchy” French toast.
But old school is a minority report at Popping Yolk. Much of the menu leans toward dishes created back in the kitchen, where the notion of a kimchi and Spam omelet is all in a morning’s work.
Popping Yolk is far from undiscovered. Fans like to … luxuriate in the joys of their barbecue pulled-pork Benedicts. Indeed, most of the yolks at Popping do their poppin’ in the eight Benedicts that dominate the menu. And the Benedicts at the Popping Yolk are perfectly made – with enough variation to keep them eternally interesting. Consider the genuine exotica of the Nashville hot chicken Benedict, and the barbecue pulled pork Benedict – both of which make Popping Yolk feel like a breakfast café in the Deep South.
There’s also Norwegian Benedict made with smoked salmon and spinach (and a very fine combination that is, too!); a far simpler Benedict with avocado and ham; a Florentine (code for spinach); a fish filet Benedict with coleslaw and tartar sauce, a culinary collision of fish and chips and breakfast; and a teriyaki chicken Benedict. Which, considering the alternatives, seems totally reg’lar.
The six omelets pretty much mirror the Benedicts, while the six breakfast sandwiches get more reg’lar still, with a ham and sausage sandwich, a bacon and cheese sandwich – and even an egg salad sandwich.
The crêpes and waffles are oversized, gooey, sweet – a serious, cheery sugar rush that makes me feel like an 8-year-old. I mean, toffee banana with ice cream? Strawberry cheesecake? My carefully curated diet will stop speaking to me. But I’ll surely be happy … until the sugar rush dies down.
Flappy Jack’s Pancake House
640 W. Route 66, Glendora; 626-852-9444, www.flappyjacks.com
Flappy Jack’s Pancake House (on Historic Route 66) is a wonder to behold – an homage to the joys of a proper American breakfast.
Waiting crowds overflow onto the patio outside, sitting like turtles in the sun, anticipating the impressively far-from-dietary delights within. Servers come flying out of the kitchen, carrying impossibly large plates of more food than seems humanly possible to consume – and yet will be consumed, with nary a morsel left.
Most tables are filled with large family groups, children galore, all grabbing bites and nibbles from each other, like something out of one of those Applebee’s ads, where dad is eating off everyone’s plates. Only in this case, portions are so large, overwhelming in fact, that a purloined strip of bacon, sausage or pancake would hardly be noticed. This is the Mt. Everest of breakfast joints, where more is always more.
By the time you‘re seated at Flappy Jack’s, chances are very good you’ll be ravenous – famished, desperate to get down to business. Old Flappy hands already know what they want. Newbies are well advised to study the menu while they wait, for the breakfast menu, as I said, does go on for a distance. And when your server, moving at just below the speed of light, shows up, you really don’t want to be one of those diners who strokes their chin, unable to choose between pancakes and waffles.
The most classic of the creations here are found under “All American Breakfast” – which is code of two eggs with stuff. Stuff like a tri tip steak, a New York strip steak, a ground beef patty, country fried steak, a grilled chicken breast, and a pair of pork chops. Oh, and also a Louisiana “Polish” sausage, corned beef hash, smoked ham, Canadian bacon, sausage links, sausage patties and chicken apple sausage. You get the point.
Pretty much everything comes with home-fried potatoes, though you can also get fruit, tomatoes or cottage cheese. (I’ve never met anyone who did.) There’s a choice of toast or pancakes too. And I’ve barely scratched the surface.
I’m a great fan of the skillets, which I think of as American-style frittatas, one of my favorite dishes to both make and eat. There are an even dozen of them, packed variously with ham, bacon, sausage, onions, peppers, gyro meat, chicken, cheeses and much more.
There’s a Country Skillet, consisting of a homemade biscuit, diced fried steak and gravy. It sounds a bit like poutine gone mad.
By comparison the two dozen Egg-Ceptional Omelets are diet dishes. Indeed, some of them, like the tomato, basil, onion and feta cheese omelet really are. Especially if you get the cottage cheese on the side. (And yes, cottage cheese as a diet dish is pure 1950s Americana. Though since I rather like cottage cheese – lots of protein – it does remind me that Richard Nixon liked it with ketchup.)
The breakfast menu continues through crêpes, seven French toast preps under French Connection, many Belgian waffles, and, of course, both pancakes and flapjacks. At Flappy Jack’s, that’s what we’ve come to expect.
There also are numerous gluten-free options for pancakes and waffles. And for those who feel the need, there’s a section called Benny’s Corner: The Classic, a Crab-cake Benedict, an Irish Benedict (with grilled corned beef hash!), a Country Benedict (sausage patties on grilled biscuits), and a Veggie Benedict of spinach, mushrooms and tomatoes. But still with eggs and hollandaise sauce.
In the world of the Benedict, eggs and sauce are essentials – even on a veggie.
Millie’s Café
1399 E. Washington Blvd., Pasadena; 626-486-2407, www.milliescafela.com
It only took nine decades for the fabled and wondrous Millie’s Café of Silver Lake to finally open a branch. And they did it in Pasadena, which is both a pleasure, and an honor. I guess better late than never is the operative phrase here.
But, perhaps even more appropriately, is the question of how many breakfasts can you order … and how much can you eat? While Millie’s is open for lunch, it’s really breakfast that dominates. This is breakfast heaven – the ultimate destination for those who live for the first meal of the day.
There’s a cartoon of what appears to be one of the Our Gang kids, complete with a beanie with a propeller on top, next to the punny motto “Good n Side.” What follows that bit of nostalgic whimsy is an encyclopedic assortment of dishes, a compendium of “what we eat for breakfast … and long have.”
The only realm of breakfast foods that seem to be missing are cereals, like Cheerios, Franken Berry and Count Chocula. And there’s no Yummy Mummy either – though I’m not sure that even exists anymore.
But if you crave eggs any which way, and then more ways – plus pancakes, waffles, French toast, bagels with lox, breakfast burritos and sandwiches – they’re all here. And they’re all available in vegan form from an alternative menu. There are gluten-free options too.
For those who crave Benedicts on a Sunday morning, really, who else offers a batch like this? There are a dozen Benedicts, including ones made with tofu, with chorizo, and with barbacoa beef and tortillas in the chilaquiles Benedict (a dish that may not exist anywhere else in the known universe).
Chances are good, especially if you show up on a weekend morning, that you’ll probably spend more time waiting for a table than you will for your food. With a menu this large, and a crowd this hungry, I don’t know how the kitchen manages to crank things out with such speed, and at such a high level of consistency.
Over the years, I’ve sat at the counter at the Silver Lake original, which faces into the kitchen, and watched the chefs at work. They seem, far as I can tell, to be normal human beings – no one in superhero Spandex. But they do crank. It’s impressive. And when you dig into whatever you order, impressed is what you’ll be.
Feeling the need for something a tad different – rather than my oft-ordered Heavenly Hash, for I do love their corned beef hash, and I crave their freshly baked biscuits – I opted for the chicken-artichoke scramble, made with three eggs and goat cheese. It’s pretty much a showcase for some of my favorite ingredients in the world; a few mushrooms would have made it beyond perfect. But perfect it was anyway – the scramble moist, but not runny, with a bit of a griddle crust; the chicken and artichokes chunky, with a hint of vinegar taste to the hearts; the feta rustic and musky.
It was big – everything here is big; subtlety and understatement are not the defining principles of Millie’s. I didn’t think I’d finish it all, especially with the addition of the biscuit. And then, it was gone, just like that. So was my daughter’s blueberry French toast, and my wife’s Irish Benedict, made with that wonderful corned beef hash.
I may have helped them finish everything, probably I did. It’s my job as a food writer, don’t you know, to eat off the plates of others. Whether they like it or not.
The Peach Café
141 E. Colorado Blvd., Monrovia 626-599-9092, www.thepeachcafe.com
Forget the notion that Disneyland is the Happiest Place on Earth. Far as I’m concerned, the happiest place is the lovable Peach Café, which sits on a side street in Monrovia, and draws a crowd of, well, very happy diners.
The lady at the front door is happy – even though she’s juggling a phalanx of waiting (and no doubt hungry) customers. The servers are happy, rushing big plates of food out of the kitchen. I assume the cooks are happy because unhappy cooks don’t prepare food as tasty as you’ll find at Peach Café. This is one peach of a place.
The Peach isn’t very big – just a storefront with tables in the front, for those who don’t mind dining in the bright light of the morning sun. Show up on a weekend, and a wait is guaranteed – though folks are glad to share their tables with you, if there’s room. And anyway, the wait gives you time to study the menu, to glance at the food on the tables, to consider the baked goods in the glass displays – and to absorb the general … happiness of the place.
The thing is, the happiness isn’t forced. It isn’t a put-on, like it used to be at the old Ed Debevic’s, where the staff pretended to be characters from the 1950s, with giant cardboard smiles on their faces. There’s honest-to-goodness concern about the food being right, and being liked.
I had the nicest conversation with one server about the inner meaning of chilaquiles. Is there just one true recipe, or can chilaquiles cover a wealth of dishes, as long as there are tortilla strips used in the prep? We decided it was the latter. Which is good, for the chilaquiles at The Peach aren’t like any others.
I found them on the specials menu – there’s a menu of specials every weekend. There, between the crispy parmesan potatoes and the eggs Benedict, and served on a hickory-maple waffle, just north of the roasted cauliflower frittata, and south of the tater tots made in-house with scallions and bacon, are the short rib chilaquiles. Really – how can you resist a dish called short rib chilaquiles? And how could I resist eating one of the best dishes to meander over my palate in many a moon?
It was wonderful on so many levels. There were crispy, freshly fried tortilla strips, tossed with a red cheese sauce and topped with pepper jack cheese, mixed with an indeterminate – but significant – portion of long-cooked shredded short ribs. A pair of eggs over medium were on top, along with sour cream and cilantro.
Plus, you had the choice of a side dish – I opted for the crispy parmesan potatoes. There were so many flavors on the plate – and they were all good. I was happy as the proverbial clam at high tide. But then, as I said, happiness seems to be the leitmotif of the Peach.
There are a fair number of large groups, celebrating birthdays – or just being alive – at long tables, with a striking number of diners working on big plates of waffles (studded with smoked bacon) topped with strawberries and powdered sugar. Or pancakes (studded with chocolate chips), also topped with strawberries and sugar. The French toast isn’t studded at all – it’s just delicious.
The breakfast menu isn’t especially long, but it is especially good. How about the dish called Nuts & Bolts – three eggs with either Nueske’s bacon, Bruce Aidell’s sausage or a smoked ham steak. When was the last time you had a choice like that?
There’s also a corned beef hash that’s as complex as any dish on the menu – salty but irresistibly so. And try as you may to not finish it, you will. What other option is there, leaving some on the plate?
Merrill Shindler is a Los Angeles-based freelance dining critic. Email mreats@aol.com.
