I enjoyed this brief note at The First Post about the morning habits of Winston Churchill. Here are his breakfast requirements:
1st Tray: Poached egg, Toast, Jam, Butter, Coffee and milk, Jug of cold milk, Cold Chicken or Meat.
2nd Tray: Grapefruit, Sugar Bowl, Glass orange squash (ice), Whisky soda.
Wash hands, cigar.
Yessir, there is nothing first thing in the morning like a brisk glass of whiskey and a nice, fat stogie to go with your toast and jam.
We like to go out for breakfast once in a while, but good breakfast places are few and far between around here. This is the Land of Dunkin Donuts, and people are trained from an early age to line up for their “regular” coffee and donut. (Note to non-New Englanders: “regular” means coffee with milk or half-and-half and four or five scoops of sugar. If you want it black, for fuck’s sake, say “black” or go back to New York or wherever the hell you came from.) But Bridget and I have been breakfast diners for many, many years and we got Charlotte indoctrinated in the ways of eating out on a Sunday morning at an early age. So scouting new (and GOOD) breakfast places is a routine enterprise.
We knew that there was a Cracker Barrel restaurant not too far from us, just off of Rt. 495, and we also knew (having lived in Southern Indiana for a while) of the reputation of Cracker Barrel in the parts of the country where it is a common sight. Friends of Bridget who were from Virginia/West Virginia/Somewhere down there simply raved about it and went there every weekend, but we had never been. So a couple of weeks ago we decided to give it a whirl.
The place was a mob scene. I had no idea how popular it was, even with the local Massholes. It seems very out of place culturally, what with the fake homespun gift store crap and the country music playing and all. It’s hard to imagine opening up a place like “Cap’n Ned’s Maine Lobster Shack” in, say, Morgantown, West Virginia, loading it up with plush velvet lobster toys, fake driftwood “sculptures” and maple sugar candy mooses and having the line out the door for brunch. But it was filled to capacity and with people lining up outside, so we were lucky to hit a lull and get a table quickly.
Ordinarily, when we go out to eat with Charlotte, she’s quite amenable to entertaining herself with the inevitable children’s menu and crayons. Every table at the Cracker Barrel, though, had that triangular peg puzzle you see in the picture at the top of the post. The object of the puzzle is to “jump” the pegs like you do with checkers, removing one at a time, until only one peg remains. I recognized the puzzle immediately, because at some point in my childhood, I had the same puzzle. My parents always used to give me puzzles, and I generally hated them, but I can recall playing with that one for quite a while. And I also recall that eventually I figured out how to do it without cheating, but I was damned if I could remember how to do it at Cracker Barrel. Charlotte and Bridget played with it for quite a while, never getting any closer than leaving 4 unjumpable pegs.
Apparently, solving the puzzle is quite the intellectual challenge among the Cracker Barrel crowd, because I ran across this website just surfing around last night, and as I was looking for a decent picture of the puzzle to include in this post, I found several thousand Google hits, most of which offered the solution. I don’t remember it being all that tricky to figure out; even though I had forgotten the solution from 40-odd years ago, I distinctly recall grasping it while playing with the damn thing in the backseat of my parents’ car.
The food? Well, it was nothing special, but given the paucity of good breakfast places it was decent enough that we went back another time. I imagine when we drive down to DC this summer, we’ll encounter them a bit more frequently, and I would rather stop at a place like that than McDonalds to get a break from the road. As far as the puzzle goes, I don’t think I’ll print out the solution for Charlotte; I’ll let her figure it out on her own. She’s a smart kid, she’ll get it sooner or later.
Our absolute all-time favorite place for going out to breakfast is SoundBites in Somerville. We don’t go out for breakfast on the weekends nearly as much as we used to in the B.C. (“Before Charlotte”) years, but when we do it is almost always to go to SoundBites. Both Bridget and I have always been a little bit flummoxed as to why there aren’t scads of good breakfast places around our particular slice of the Boston Metro pie, but I suspect it has to do with the outrageous number of Dunkin Donuts locations. Nevertheless, we know a good thing when we see it, and SoundBites is it.
Over the years we learned a few tricks: always go first thing in the morning to beat the crowd. When we were sans enfant this was no problem, as we used to be the sort of people who got up early even on the weekends. These days, though, we’re slugabeds who won’t rise much before 8:00 or 8:30 on weekend mornings, and we have to make a special effort to get up and drive all the way from where we live in East Bumfuck to Somerville. We also learned that you don’t linger at your table at SoundBites. You eat, you pay, you get out of the way. THAT’s how you get Yasser (the owner) to love you.
As I say, sometimes months would go by between visits, so last year we were completely unaware of their move from their teeny-weeny digs to the vast expanse of the defunct Mexican restaurant right next door. It was a brilliant move for them, instantly expanding the number of tables, adding a full-service bar, and transforming the place from a little breakfast joint to a complete restaurant. What we also did not know, though, was that they’d been forced out of their original space by their landlord, who stole their chef and opened his own breakfast cafe in the same spot.
Not surprisingly, there have been some ill feelings between the former landlord and Yasser, and this morning Adam at Universal Hub linked to this blog post about the strife between them and the landlord’s attempt to bury the hatchet by apologizing for some of his bad behavior. Yasser prefers to keep carrying the grudge, however, and I don’t blame him a bit. It’s not clear from the linked article exactly what has gone on and who has been guilty of what, but apparently the cops have had to break up arguments and things have gotten ugly from time to time. That’s pretty low, if you ask me, and it looks to me like the landlord is trying to score some points by making Yasser look like the bad guy, but seems to me that kicking out your tenant and stealing his chef so you can try to steal his business is pretty low down in the first place.
I think we’ll be making a point of getting up early one morning this weekend just to pay a visit. I could go for a plate of Moroccan Eggs, and Yasser always flirts with Charlotte, and now that he’s got more tables he’s not quite as agitated if you’re a slow eater. Just don’t bring the Sunday paper with you.
Funny how all the things your mother told you to do turn out to be what’s best for you, isn’t it?
In the space of the last couple of weeks, there have been a glut of news stories about various research studies that have concluded that we need to eat a good breakfast every day, that we need to get eight hours of restful sleep, and all that soda, even the diet kind, isn’t very good for you.
Next week, some unviersity will undoubtedly publish a study about why it’s important to wear clean underwear in case they take you to the hospital.
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