The Meaning of Breakfast

This one’s for all of us. Our first open column, if you will, because this is a subject everyone has an opinion about. One of the most contentious subjects in the history of humankind, a subject that has troubled the world for eons, with no clear resolution in sight.

Where should we go to breakfast?

The seriousness of this subject struck me, on one severely undercaffeinated and bleary eyed morning, when my girlfriend and I decided to take a chance on a friend’s recommendation of his favorite breakfast place in Cambridge. We had been heading to Zoe’s, our old standby (you’ll be hearing more about it in a later column), when our friend, whose taste we had no reason to doubt, mind you, suggested we go to the Brookline Diner, specifically on the basis that we had to try their home fries. On first glance, the place made a good impression. Small, poorly lit, old weather beaten booths and a few tables floating in the middle. Brick walls and a single short order cook spending half his time watching TV. Somewhat limited menu, but passable. I got a spinach and feta cheese omelette, my girlfriend got pancakes. We both got the home fries. The food arrived a few cups of coffee later. And something was just… wrong. The omelette was inside out, first off, just a patty of scrambled egg with a pile of spinach and a rectangle of feta cheese and entirely too many unnecessary spices. And the home fries… the home fries. They had carrots and zucchini in them. Carrots. Zucchini. Now, I have no problem with any kind of vegetables. I’ll basically eat anything. There is no category of food I’ll ever dismiss. I like carrots. I like zucchini and all other forms of squash.
Keep them out of my fucking home fries.
Now, let me break from this rant to make the point that this, right here, is the crux of the problem.
Probably half of you, right now, are reading this and thinking: “Hey, goddamn, I’d love to try some of those home fries.” And another half agrees wholeheartedly. Still another half (Three halves! See how complicated this is?) have some entirely other idea of what breakfast should be.
This is because breakfast is about wish fulfillment. Breakfast is the closest any of us will come, on a daily basis, to truly achieving our dreams. It’s the one meal of the day set up to give you exactly what you want, with such infinite varieties and combinations of food available as to be almost obscene. No other meal affords one this opportunity.

So it is only appropriate that I kick off this column with what I consider to be the pinnacle, the absolute epitome of breakfast, in fact the only place besides my own kitchen where I’ve ever liked the pancakes: Orphan Andy’s.

My own personal discovery of the place came on a typically dreary, fog shrouded September night in San Francisco some ten years ago.
I was escorting a girl I knew back to the dorms from her work on Market Street (I did this almost every night - I was madly in love with her, a sentiment I shared with her shortly before Christmas break, after which she never spoke to me again) and we were both hungry. We’d tried a few 24 hour joints around Church Street, but neither of us were terribly keen on them, and besides, the bus was nowhere in sight, so we decided to walk a bit further, into the Castro. And right there, on the corner of Castro and Market, stood Orphan Andy’s, a beacon in the fog, a refuge from cold and hunger.
I ordered an Ortega Chile and Jack Cheese omelette, which to my surprise automatically came with pancakes (although they could be substituted with home fries and toast, but who would want to when faced with that choice?). It was perfect. The pancakes were a deep brown, smothered in butter, not a trace of the white, doughy awfulness that passes for pancakes in most restaurants. The omelette was brimming with ingredients and took up half the plate. We were barely able to walk when we left.
Over the next ten years, I found every excuse I could to come back. I took every friend I had there at least twice. I went there sweaty and drunk after every show I ever went to in the city, every pathetic night spent in a bar or a strip club. I spent my 22nd birthday there, running down the street to the bar on the corner to have a celebratory shot at the exact moment of my birth, then coming back and wolfing pancakes and eggs. In short, I’ve spent some of the best and worst nights of my life there, always eating the same impeccably delicious, greasy as hell breakfast food at three in the morning, surrounded by club kids and 7 foot tall drag queens, leather daddies and confused tourists.
I haven’t been there now in almost a year, and I miss it terribly.

And here’s the point: Breakfast is more than a meal. There’s something about it that breeds both dissent and connection. It’s comfort from loneliness, a marker of all our beginnings and endings, a place to reconvene with friends after a long night out, one last taste on your tongue before the oblivion of sleep.
Breakfast is our soul, distilled to it’s essence and served by an overworked waitress.

And it’s something different for all of us. That’s what this column is for.

Orphan Andy’s
3991 17th St.
San Francisco, CA