Better Breakfast Month

This is Better Breakfast Month. I used to eat out a lot, and that meant Sunday breakfasts at the Uptown Diner, repasts the likes of which would tax the gullet of Diamond Jim - a puck of sausage, crisp bacon, hash browns, eggs, and French Toast as thick as a Tom Clancy novel, dusted with powdered sugar and drowned in maple syrup.

It wasn't just an indulgence, it was practical: if you rubbed the hash browns on your chest, the grease made an excellent conducting gel when they slapped the paddles on your chest. If breakfast didn't end with someone shouting CLEAR and a cleansing jolt of electricity, it wasn't breakfast. I miss those days. Nothing at home ever compares to a good restaurant breakfast. A good diner grill has a sense of history; it remembers twenty years of breakfasts past, and passes on its wisdom. Bacon on a grill has innumerable ancestors. Bacon from a microwave always tastes like it's been punished for something.

I said nothing compares to a good restaurant breakfast. When I was a waiter at the Valli in Dinkytown we served a .89 special: vinyl eggs and crumbly toast with a cold pat of butter. On their worst days the omelets tasted like a melted shower-curtain lining. The brave among us would try the Eggs Benedict, suffer the clammy shudders of food poisoning from the Hollandaise sauce, then wait a year before trying again. Yet the place was always packed. Why? Because sometimes it's just too much bother to crack an egg and pick out the shells and that little slippery white fetal comma attached to the yolk, and no matter how grim the eggs might be, pepper helps. Coffee, too.

James Lileks, a humorist and social commentator in the Will Rogers tradition, writes and otherwise performs for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He is also the author of six books, with a seventh in the offing to be first published on this website. He is the Curator of The QOR Collection at The Club.