Worst Breakfast For A While

The Chocolate Moose
U.S. Highway 53 South
International Falls, Minnesota

(at County Road 7, near the airport)



When we came across this place while looking for a place to eat at seven in the morning in a town that apparently doesn't open until much later, we thought we had scored. The outside presents a nice, new, clean look, sort of like a rustic Perkins, or a sophisticated Cracker Barrel. Inside, though it's smaller than either of those chains' locations, we felt the same kind of welcome family-style warmth.

When we saw the menu, we felt reassured. The usual foods were offered, with a minimum of too-cute names, and with prices just as we expected. The service, too, was just as it should have been: polite, reasonably efficient, competent.

What does that mean?

The food was less satisfying.

I opted for the sausage and cheese omelet. No effort was made in the kitchen to get those eggs to do anything but lie there. What I was served was not an omelet, but bits of sausage wrapped in, effectively, a flimsy egg tortilla, formed into a rectangle just the right size for a couple of slices of pasteurized processed cheese food to adorn. The large plate was kept from appearing vacant by a bushel of potatoes denominated as "home fries." They were, in fact, frozen chunks of potato, the size and shape of large dice, cut by some distant machine before being bagged; then thrown into a mess of hot grease just long enough to melt the ice crystals inside. Only the pancakes I'd chosen as a bread were at all enjoyable: they would have earned an average rating.

My friend's "breakfast sandwich" was worse. The same kind of scrambled egg, reminiscent of the sort one gets at Subway these days, folded around a slice of ... well, let's call it cheese, and served with a sausage pattie on what the menu and the waitress called a croissant. Real croissants, it seems, have yet to make an appearance this far north. This was something that looked like two heels from a loaf of white bread, glued together by that stuff that was not cheese.

I think that if the need for breakfast in International Falls ever presents itself again, I may want to quickly learn some hunting and trapping skills.



Local Best

Chess Club Cafe
1020 Highway 281 South
Blanco, Texas

Being the best place to eat in a little town like Blanco isn't all that tough. Oh, I know: there are places there that have their partisans, restaurants that show the occasional whiff of flair in concept, menu or preparation, or maybe just a place that made you feel particularly welcome one day. But by and large, Blanco, like most small American towns, get by with a handful of ordinary cafés and diners, maybe a fast-food franchise or three, and a beer hall that sells burgers and nachos and calls itself a grill. Sometimes they add an "e" to the end to make it seem classier, but it's still a bar and grill.

For unpretentious little Blanco, population 2,205, the culinary bar was raised just a skosh when the Chess Club Cafe opened a couple of years ago. Out on the south end of town, nestled in between the Dollar General store and one of the newer fast-food places, its laid-back blue-and-white hand-painted sign can barely compete with the vibrant reds and yellows of its neighbours; and being set well back from the road, under the spread of a couple of ancient oak trees, it hardly is a place that leaps out at passing travelers.

The major distinction of the Chess Club is that they do all their own food preparation, from the mayonnaise to the pastries. Better still, they actually do a good job at it.

This visit was just a coffee break, but even so it was extraordinary. The coffee was strong; not a characteristic calculated to recommend it to me, but unlike the high-octane brew at most Starbucks-era coffee shops, this managed strength without the acidic bitterness that Seattle-style coffees cherish. It was, even in its powerful state, understated.

To accompany that, we asked for a random selection of pastries. Our waitress gave us an apple danish, a cheese danish, a cinnamon roll and a peanut-butter brownie.

I'm not wild about cinnamon rolls, but this one was better than most. Rather than trying for the steroidal size that is a selling point in some restaurants back in town, Chess Club has gone for quality, and attained it. The roll was light, the dough was yeasty, and the icing was sweet without being cloying. The overall effect was much like I remember cinnamon rolls in the era before they were a trend.

What's that mean?

The peanut-butter brownie was tasty, too, with a mild peanut-butter flavour, and a light drizzle of chocolate icing; but it had an uneven texture. The ends were just about as they should have been, but the middle part seemed to be retaining a little water. That flaw, though, wasn't significant enough to seriously overcome the overall quality of the thing.

The danishes were exquisite. Both had a light puff-pastry shell folded around truly outstanding fillings and drizzled with sugar. The apple filling was marvelously seasoned with cinammon and, I believe nutmeg, and had a fine consistency. The cream cheese filling was perhaps the best I have tasted in many years. Just writing this a day later makes me want another.

And all this was less than ten bucks. You just can't beat that.

Mmm. Now, That's Coffee

The Cup
3909 Camp Bowie Boulevard
Fort Worth

(between Montgomery and Crestline)

When my friend Rick and I stepped into The Cup, I had one of those flashbacks that can make you think you've entered a time portal, and were going to be forced to relive an unpleasant childhood. Four women of a certain age, expensively dressed and absorbed in conversation, were seated in a circle between the door and the counter, with empty cups and a tray of pastries uneaten on the coffee table. I thought I had stumbled into that period of my youth, circa 1970, when life seemed to be infested with these society types, coyly issuing platitudes to one another, claws a-quiver in their sheaths, knives ready to hand in Italian-leather shoulder bags. I made it a point to find a seat out of sight of the group, who were probably no more lethal to bystanders now than they were then, but with whom interaction is to be avoided. Sadly, it was too chilly for the attractive patio out back, but we found our refuge.

We were just there to find a light breakfast and kill some time before the Kimbell Museum opened at noon, and I've always felt comfortable enough in Fort Worth's near-west side, an area where women dress for committee meetings while men dress for the stock yards, and everyone seems to be doing fund-raising for one charity or another, usually connected to TCU or the museums down the street. The Cup has not long been on the Boulevard; its pedigree stretches back only to around July, but it is a perfect fit with its surroundings: clean, tastefully decorated, only slightly fru-fru (which I'm sure most of its customers would call "understated"), with the air of an elegance that considers Camp Bowie Boulevard to be the winter home of knowledgeable Fifth Avenue denizens. The Christmas decorations were up: several dozen monochromatic silver ornaments hanging on ribbons from the acoustic-tile ceiling over the service area, an arrangement I found a pleasing contrast to the usual clutter of holiday gewgaws, doodads and whatnots.

Well, that's OK; we just wanted coffee and a little something to eat. We turned out to have made a fortunate choice. (Everybody gets lucky, some time.) 

The counter attendant was helpful, if not quite knowledgeable about coffee culture. When I asked her if their coffee was slow-drip, she shrugged and said, with a slight grin of confusion, "I guess." It turns out the correct answer was "no," which was what I'd expected. While slow-drip coffee is de riguer in snootier locations on the Left and Right Coasts, here in the Real World it's the sort of impractical, wasteful thing one associates with rom-com movies and snobs on the Left and Right Coasts. It was plain ol' high-quality drip coffee. 

The coffee is illy, an Italian brand, which appealed to my distaff side, and is good stuff even without the benefit of prejudice. It hovers between the burned-corn taste of American coffee, which I like when it's not too strong, and the bitter taste of dredged-up river-bottom that characterizes coffee in Europe and, from what I hear, other parts of the Old World. At The Cup, we were served fairly thick coffee that reminded me of the best I've had in Latin America. I'm not one of those people who view coffee as an art form; I think of it as a drink, one that forces me to relax while it cools, then revs me up with a dose of caffeine. This coffee did that, and did it well. 

For the light meal, I went with the vaguely named Breakfast Sandwich: ham and cheese with a poached egg on something called a "morning round," for about $4. I chose it because I wanted something to bitch about, and when the cheerful young lady behind the counter described it, I thought I had my subject. Alas, no; it proved to be not just good, but very good. The ham had a hint of rosemary about it; the cheese was good quality Swiss, not that oily corner-cutting stuff you often get; the poached egg was actually poached, and poached correctly, to just the right degree of doneness to give you all the flavour and none of the gelatinous liquidity of an undercooked egg. And the "morning round" turned out to be a sort of better Pepperidge Farms version of raisin bread, with a soupçon of maple sweetness. The whole thing got some time in a panini press and I was presented with a breakfast of exquisite flavour and texture. If I'd been hungry, I'd've ordered another.

Rick, who seemed on this trip to be on a quest for the Kolache Of The Gods, ordered a couple of sausage bagels, which are breakfast sausages wrapped in bagel dough to resemble kolaches. They must have been good — they certainly looked good: slightly reddish sausage links in admirably browned wrappings — because they disappeared before I could make a detailed inquiry.

We enjoyed another cup of coffee, and chatted with the shop's owner, a pleasant, sensible-seeming woman who is the spitting image of Van Cliburn's piano teacher's daughter (except, forty years younger). She, I suspect, is as much at home with the junior-league crowd that frequents her shop as she is with the boots-and-jeans crowd that passes by on the way to Denny's.

Coffee for a Cause

The Loft
4400 US 281
Spring Branch

(half a mile beyond Highway 46, on the northbound side)

It's just a coffee shop. It sits out on the highway in a limestone house (with a loft, yes, and a fireplace) to provide a meeting place for the locals, and a spot to relax, have a cup of coffee and some light refreshment. The need for such a place in that area is matched with the desire of a local church to raise money for causes it supports, a current trend in the coffee-shop trade. On the day we visited, the money raised was going to a project to build a home for victims of human trafficking, and to an anti-poverty project in Africa. It doesn't make the coffee any better, but it makes you feel better about choosing this place over any others. Because most of the work, if not all, is done by volunteers, the shop produces more money for the causes.

The volunteers who staff the shop are uniformly cheerful and friendly. I suspect that if we stopped in more than once in twenty years, we'd begin to develop relationships with these people, finding the points of common interest. But even as strangers passing through, we felt welcomed and cheered by the attitude of the staff. And the place itself is airy and clean and nicely decorated, adding to the pleasure we took in being there.

The food isn't particularly remarkable. Breakfast tacos, made up in advance and wrapped in foil, are in bins on one side of the room. There is a bakery case with various small treats, all home-made for the cause, and all reasonably well done. I selected a sausage kolache that looked more like a biscuit, and a potato-and-egg taco. The kolache had a very nice, slightly sweet flavour in the dough, and was filled with a tasty portion of sausage, nicely seasoned. The taco was, well, a tad bland, but at least the egg wasn't dry, as so often happens when tacos are made and stored in that fashion. Rick also had a sausage kolache, along with a ham-and-cheese kolache which wasn't as good, and could have used a little more ham in it.

The main draw, though, is the coffee. There were four types on offer, one of them decaf. I went with the breakfast blend, a nice medium-strength drink. Rick's choice was the Texas Pecan coffee, which smelled heavenly and made me regret my choice.