Eat This Blog: Eggs & Corned Beef Hash, Freeway Restaurant, Toledo

Posted on 8 May 2008 under Breakfast, Eat This Blog, Restaurant Chit-Chat | 6 Comments

I love a good breakfast. Have I told you I love breakfast before? Yeah well, I still do. If it were at all possible I’d have breakfast for breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea, luncheon, dinner, supper, before-bed snack, in-bed snack, a midnight snack, and even a two a.m. feeding.

This morning’s was a good breakfast. This is a Three Egg and Corned Beef Hash breakfast with the toast being replaced by a couple biscuits and whipped butter. Luna Pier Cook reader Dorothy might recognize this Corned Beef Hash as being from the Freeway Restaurant, across Navarre from St. Charles Hospital in Toledo. The restaurant’s been around since 1957, and many people I know recall eating there when they were kids. Yeah, this is real Corned Beef Hash. As the restaurant advertises it, it’s obviously “straight from the brisket”, being moist, tender and flavorful, with just the right amount of saltiness, cooked as perfectly as those three over-easy eggs.

Eggs like that make me jealous, as I need so much more practice at making them like this. I have the right pans …

Oh, and we can’t forget the restaurant’s signature “copper-topped” register counter.


Click on either image for a larger version.

Dudley’s Diner, Reynold’s Rd., Toledo, Ohio

Posted on 24 December 2007 under Breakfast, Restaurant Chit-Chat | 1 Comment

It’s been a few years since we started wanting to visit Dudley’s Diner in Toledo. For a while we were driving by it almost daily, watching its glass-and-chrome Art Deco diner exterior glisten in the sun as we went by. Unfortunately we were always on the way to somewhere else or simply weren’t hungry enough to feel the visit was justified. Yesterday evening when we were talking about an early morning of final Christmas shopping today it became apparent this restaurant was on-the-way to where we were going to split up to buy for each other. So this morning at 7 a.m. we snagged our 2-year-old Goddaughter and headed for Dudley’s.

Dudley’s Diner has been located on Reynold’s Rd. south of Dorr St. since 1955. About 7 years ago the owner built this new restaurant from the ground up and closed the former location for good. The former location lives on in photos and murals on the new diner’s walls, while the interior itself reflects the diner’s roots in the 1950s. Obvious differences are in the more modern equipment behind the counter, and the Soundspheres on the ceiling providing crystal-clear background music.

Of course our 2-year-old guest went with the Mickey Mouse pancake with syrup … which she honestly didn’t eat too much of (she is two after all). Mary went with the breakfast special of two eggs over medium with a short stack of pancakes. She’s been eating Egg Beaters for a couple months now, so having a couple real eggs was something she seriously appreciated! Her pancakes were light and fluffy, only needing a bit of syrup for the flavor she’s used to. I ordered the skillet, which you can see in the first photo in this post. This is basically a Spanish-style omelet placed over a layer of shredded-and-cooked hash browns, and finished with some shredded cheese. What’s nice about this skillet is that you can select your fillings individually. I ordered sausage, onion and green pepper, which were cooked in with the three eggs. While this is a modified Spanish omelet, it had a great flavor and was very satisfying. I’d order it again.

What we really liked about Dudley’s Diner though was the friendliness of the staff. We’re glad we stopped in, and probably won’t pass it up the next time we’re down on Reynold’s Rd.

Rambling about Breakfast

Posted on 19 December 2007 under Bed & Breakfasts, Breakfast, Restaurant Chit-Chat | 4 Comments


The cover of the December 2007 issue of Restaurants & Institutions.
The dish shown is the $10 Cast Iron Skillet Eggs, on the Brunch menu
at the 707 Restaurant & Bar in Philadelphia.

Some cooks and chefs just don’t understand breakfast. I recall about a year ago seeing a classified ad in a local paper. One of the more high-end country clubs nearby was looking specifically for a breakfast cook. The ad ran for a few days and then disappeared. About a week later, the same ad was back in the same paper word-for-word, with an addition in all-capital letters: “MUST BE ABLE TO FLIP EGGS!”

Did you ever wonder why most “better” restaurants don’t open until lunch or later? Or why a certain level of cookbook will either ignore morning meals completely or touch on them far too briefly?

Go to a bookstore. Look for whole sections of cookbooks on seafood, grilling, meats, desserts, baking, Greek food, French food, German food, southern cooking … and then, go find the section on breakfast.

Nope. Zilch. Nada. Ain’t happening. They just don’t do that. There’s a few books on the subject within the various sections, but honestly there really aren’t that many.

When he reads this, the chef at our favorite restaurant might feel I’m picking on him. I do tease him on occasion that he’d get a great breakfast crowd if he’d open, say, at 6 a.m vs. 5 p.m. during the week. As that crew also runs the cafeteria at the local college and serves breakfast meals there as part of the catering contract … well, that’s all it is, is teasing. I’d prefer they continue what they’re doing on their regular menu, as that’s enough work … a lot of work. Yeah, he’ll smack me for this anyway, but that’s to be expected.

I have a few nice books on cooking breakfast meals. Great Lakes, Great Breakfasts the first of three such cookbooks from the Michigan Lake to Lake Bed & Breakfast Association, contains recipes from the owners of a number of member inns across the state. I have two copies of Morning Food by Margaret S. Fox, one copy being mine and the other belonging to my son Adam (shown here cooking omelets for residents at Luna Pier’s senior housing center). And nearby there’s The Big Book of Breakfast by Maryana Vollstedt.

Of course, there are countless books in my bookshelves containing sections on preparing breakfast meals. Unfortunately, the recipes in most of these breakfast chapters are far from unique and seem to mimic one another, from the cast iron and camping books having similar recipes for skillets and such, to the larger “do everything” books from the 1940s onward all showing very similar dishes. There’s not much that’s unique regarding breakfast among the larger and more popular cookbooks unless you look outside what’s considered to be a “normal” cookbook.

Think about your local grocery store for a moment. The bakery has donuts and breakfast cakes that may be from today, maybe not. The cereal aisles are identical from one store to another, with even the so-called organic varieties being knock-offs of popular brands. The eggs are in the dairy section, the sausage is over in with the pork or the lunchmeats, and there’s a number of frozen bread products and pre-made, pre-packaged items over in the frozen foods.

How much work would it actually take to create a “Breakfast Foods” section in a supermarket. Sure, the store would have to have both freezer and refrigerator cases in one spot, and the meats gang would have to walk a little further to deal with this area. But is it so far-fetched from separating the seafood out from the meats, as so many grocers have done already?

Speaking of chains, breakfast meals at chain restaurants have been disappointing through the years and continue to be so. I’m known for saying my favorite meal at McDonald’s is their breakfasts. But I have to admit that’s not to say their breakfasts are really anything to make noise about. It’s more my way of saying the rest of their menu doesn’t impress me much either. I make the distinction about their breakfast only in response to my being asked what I like there. Reality is that I prefer Tim Horton’s sausage and egg biscuit over anything at McDonald’s, but I’ll eat breakfast at McDonald’s if there’s no other choice.

Larger chains such as Bob Evans have let me down. Back in college in the early 1980s I ate a lot of Bob Evans breakfasts. I lived on the west end of Columbus in the apartment complex behind Westland Shopping Center and the Bob Evans on W. Broad on the other side of the mall was where I had breakfast on occasion. My favorite item was those biscuits, warm and flaky, extra butter please. But even at Bob Evans the breakfast servings have gotten smaller over the years. I might be imagining things, but I think their plates might have gotten smaller at some point as well … What’s really torqued me off though was, at some point, having to ask for a second biscuit as only one was served with the meal. I haven’t been back to Bob Evans too much after that happened.

It’s the independent operators who seem to have a serious handle on breakfast meals. Even smaller chains are more-or-less locked into what they’re allowed to allowed to offer on their breakfast menus. We were fortunate at the Big Boy in west Columbus in 1983 to be able to try something new at the time, a thing called a “breakfast bar”. Using a portable steam table that plugged into an outlet at the end of a rebuilt in-place salad bar, we tried a few things before realizing they weren’t right for use in steam tables (i.e., pie fillings as pancake “toppings”, grits and oatmeals, toast, etc.) Of course it caught on after a while … although the cook seemed rather irritated that she had to take time out from cooking other meals to take care of my constant requests on weekends. Twenty-four years later though, even a lot of the Big Boy breakfast buffets seem to now be standardized … i.e., ”normal”.

But that Big Boy wasn’t where I regularly had breakfast in Columbus. At that time, Izzy’s out of Cincinnati attempted an expansion. They opened a location at High & Broad Streets downtown, across the street from the statehouse. You literally couldn’t get into the place at lunchtime, particularly on weekends, with a line forming outside even when it was raining or snowing hard. Their menu doesn’t show it now, but at the time they were offering a corned beef omelet (the corned beef being made from scratch in the basement kitchen) with one of their crisp potato pancakes on the side. Visiting them 4 - 5 times each week I was one of their more-frequent customers, and it got to the point where they stopped letting me pay! I have no idea why that location would have closed, but I was disappointed in 1997 to find something else had unsuccessfully replaced it.

Would you like a good restaurant breakfast? Stay clear of the bigger chains. Even a mom-and-pop place in the tiny business district of a small village community is more likely to have fresher breakfasts cooked with greater care than any chain place, large or small. They’re also more likely to have something unique on their menu as well. I’ve always gravitated toward those restaurants where the owner is not only actively involved in operations, but is also likely to be on-site as well. Chef Dan Bloomquist at the Trout Town Country Café up in Kalkaska, Michigan will probably ask how you enjoyed his Specialty French Toast with the corn flake and pecan coating (pictured above) as he’s making the rounds of the tables in the two dining rooms in his smallish restaurant. And Chef Silverio Conté at the Bolles Harbor Café (up the road a few miles from us) will probably relate the story of his Lumberjack Breakfast Skillet Special (shown left), telling you the prime rib in this beautiful dish was intended for the dinner special and ended up in your exquisite breakfast instead.

Of course, neither of these gentlemen can really top the breakfasts made for you at home or when you’re visiting family, the meal made either by yourself or by someone who loves you. A couple of my kids (teenagers) have become rather adept at making my father’s version of Eggs In A Frame (pictured at right). When the kids are in town I can be almost assured one of them will offer to make me this breakfast at some point. If not, I can normally tell when they’re starting on their own plate of it and I can piggyback my order onto theirs! Of course, Adam can and does flip eggs (sometimes without a spatula), and with my help he can knock out four full-size omelets in 5 minutes flat. These kids are also privy to those huge southern breakfasts made by their aunts and great-aunts, women raised in the south who will happily and without hesitation load a table to the breaking point with hot food before even thinking about starting to wake guests for breakast.

Certainly the next-best thing to eating at home is eating at a truly excellent bed & breakfast. These people aren’t generally out to make a whole lot of money in their business. When having people visit from out-of-town, we’ve decided the best place for them to stay is the B&B Breakfast Depot in Oregon, Ohio. We stay with them as well as we simply love the place, and owners Nate and Linda Brinkman are such great people. Nate keeps the place (and its ridable trains) running smoothly, while Linda cooks immaculate breakfasts for guests, such as her French Crepes with Whole Fresh Cherries (shown at left). There are other incredible dishes from Linda’s repertoire, such as her mouthwatering Seafood Scramble. But what’s even more special about bed & breakfasts such as this one is a beautiful location (just east of Maumee Bay State Park on Lake Erie), and the warm home (below) commercial contractor Linda has put together to fulfill her dream of owning a B&B.

One of the more common phrases that’s made the rounds over the years is that of, “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day”. A current ad for Jimmy Dean’s Breakfast Skillet products shows the father (the guy in the sun costume) cooking one of the skillets while each family member makes an excuse as to why they’re unable to have breakfast. While the ad is one of the few of these ads without a decent punchline, the point it attempts to make is a good one: We’re just no good in the morning without a decent breakfast. We can try to be supermen or superwomen, getting by on a granola bar and a cup of coffee. But when it comes right down to it, is that granola bar and cup of coffee what you really want for breakfast. Can you … must you … should you do better?

Think about it.