Breakfast At Tiffany's because everyone does brunch in SF b***hes!!
Brunch in San Francisco is essential, quintessential, necessary, the see and be seen and most often, the life blood of many a restaurant in this town. Sure they open with grand ideas of just doing dinner service but usually it only takes about three months before, surprise!, they’ve added weekend brunch. I’m not sure why they even bother and should just hit the ground running. Though, even with so many places offering brunch, it seems waiting in line is also something of a rite of passage too. It always amazed me and the SO how people would wait over an hour just to eat eggs. I mean, so many places offer brunch you can always find a spot with no waiting.
Sure, there are the uber popular places where the crowds congregate, but even those places have times of the day where you can show up and get in or not really have to wait more than ten minutes for a table. That used to be a game we played to try and find the spot where we could just roll out of bed on a Saturday or Sunday (the most popular day) and waltz into a place like we knew the owner and get him his giant cup of coffee and me and ice tea to go with my Diet Mtn. Dew. It can happen, well, except for Plow, that place is always busy. I lived a block up from them for awhile and even on a Wednesday morning they were packed! I mean, the lemon ricotta pancakes with blueberry compote are tasty but wait an hour or more for them? Yeah, not happening.
Of course doing brunch for any restaurant can either be a boon or a burden. In my view, doing a half decent breakfast—eggs, bacon, hash browns, coffee!—can get you a following, particularly if it is affordable. The basic ingredients aren’t all that expensive (usually, unless you are going the whole organic route thingy) so if you can fry up something tasty which can please peeps, it can be a money maker. But the flip side is, if you do it too good, you get a reputation for being a brunch spot and people then forget you also do lunch and dinner. It is a risk for sure, but in SF, it seems it can pay off if you can find the right balance. Though there are places in town that only do breakfast/brunch/lunch and they seem to be quite good at it and lean into it to offer up tasty and affordable, which is why they get the big lines.
Sure, I could give you a list of them but all you gotta do is wander around the city on a Sunday and look for groups of sidewalk standers looking at their phones. Most likely they are waiting for a table at a super popular brunch spot. And while brunch is big on the weekends, Sunday does seem to be the more popular day to get together with your friends and spill the tea on what went down the past week and Saturday night. Or, in some cases, get their help in piecing together just what you did in your inebriated state and how you woke up to some strange husky in your bed, like this woman.
So it was that about three weeks before the total pandemic lockdown I texted up Ms. L to go grab some brunch at a place called Breakfast At Tiffany’s in the Portola District. Honestly, it is a part of town I really had not been to before. Maybe rode through on a MUNI bus but never actually ventured over. I stumbled across the restaurants website online and it is what spurred me to want to check them out. New neighborhood and restaurant I had not been to seemed like the perfect combo to check out on a decent weather Sunday. Yes, I know, the most popular day, which is why we decided to hit them up later in the day. Like a half hour before closing kind of thing. Having worked in a restaurants over the years I am well aware the eye roll I always gave as a server when people came in close to closing but we were not going to be lollygagging there since we wanted to amble about the hood too. See, I was thinking about it at least.
Which brings me to my last brunch in San Francisco and my not review of Tiffany’s on a weekend where you just wanna get out of your apartment because you are feeling too lazy to scramble eggs with s**t and feel like paying somebody else to do it for you.
San Bruno Ave Omelette Scramble Special with cheesy hash browns
Besides their French spelling of omelet at omelette, it seemed odd to also call it a scramble. I mean, can it really be both? Or it that just an existential question to ponder over a brunch without alcohol? Does alcohol make it easier to ponder? So many questions for what clearly looks in the picture as a scramble instead of a classic omelet. Or maybe they just call it both in case the cook gets it from the grill/pan to the plate in one folded piece or not. Either way this came with onions, spinach, mushrooms, Jack cheese and sausage (a $1 upgrade). Not sure what makes it special to San Bruno Ave, the main drag through Portola. Still more questions. The hash browns are actually an upgrade from just the standard pile of stringy potatoes. These have added cheese and a side of sour cream (another upgrade for $1.75). And of course the curled orange slice for presentation and you know, to prevent scurvy. Eggs and potatoes. Sure, you can do this at home but just thinking about the effort to pull it all together is exhausting. Kind of like when you go to the grocery store and buy a bunch of stuff then get home, put it all away and then feel too tired to fix any of it for dinner so you just order delivery. Or am I the only one? More questions!!
Fried chicken eggs benedict with hash browns
Eggs benedict are a brunch staple and something you really do order out because poaching eggs at home is hard and a hassle. Again, maybe just me, but when was the last you poached an egg at home? While these are on an English muffin, the hollandaise is replaced with sausage gravy as that evidently pares better with fried chicken and boiled eggs. This side is the standard hash browns with red and green peppers. I’m sure I could have gone all in on the artery clogging with some cheese and sour cream (that is so me) but I figured the gravy was enough and I’d be in a food coma an hour after eating this already. I’ve seen variations of benedict around town (not everyone likes Canadian bacon you know!) so it was something different at least. If you can put a piece of fried chicken on a waffle with syrup I guess you put it on a piece of toasted muffin with a runny egg and cover it in sausage gravy too. Even in “healthy-ish conscious” SF this will fly pretty well. See what I did there, fly, chicken, get it? Don’t care if you do, sometimes things are just for me.
And just like that brunch was over. We showed up late. Didn’t have to wait. Got our food. Caught up. And finished and left before being forced out the door since they were closing after all. That’s brunch in SF in a nutshell. Homestyle food, friends, sometimes booze and line waiting, if you are into those things. Thus was also my last brunch before the pandemic and turns out, my last brunch in general in San Francisco before the sun set on my time and my life took another turn. It’s been a long curvy road the last few years but I still had one last old school SF classic to venture into before what had been building for a couple years now came to fruition. It is a story for next time.
