Page 17 - foodservice magazine Feb 2019

TRADE TALK
17
BREAKFAST CONVENTIONS
RESTAURANTS ARE MOVING FURTHER AND FURTHER AWAY FROM THE MEAT-AND-THREE-VEG FORMULA, SO WHY DO MOST CAFES REMAIN IN THE WARM EMBRACE OF EGGS ON TOAST? ALEKSANDRA BLISZCZYK TALKS TO THE CHEFS AND RESTAURATEURS BEHIND SOME OF SYDNEY'S BEST CAFES – THOSE THAT ARE BREAKING THE BREAKFAST MOULD, AND THOSE THAT PUT CLASSICS ON A PEDESTAL – TO FIND OUT WHERE THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL OF THE DAY IS HEADING.
TALK
In 1894, a Wall Street stockbroker named Lemuel Benedict walked into the
Waldorf Hotel one morning, asking the waiters for something to cure his hangover. The chef plonked a poached egg on some smoked cut of pig, drowned it in Hollandaise and called it Eggs Benedict. 125 years later, the dish has barely changed, and neither have our morning appetites.
“People’s tastes are changing, but breakfast tastes are just changing a bit slower,” says
chef and co-owner of Three
Blue Ducks cafe Andy Allen. “Mornings are hard – you just want to be comforted with your first meal of the day, and for a lot of people that comfort comes from food they’ve grown up eating.”
The pool of Australian restaurants that stick to the meat- and-three-veg model at dinner
is shrinking, but the number
of cafes slinging towering Eggs Benedicts, beautiful smashed avos, and edible-flower laden mueslis is only growing.
“If we didn't serve some form of the classics, I don't think we would still be open,”
says Allen about Three Blue Ducks, which has locations
in Bronte, Rosebery, Byron Bay and Brisbane. “As much
as sometimes I'd love to scrap poached eggs on toast, the punters have always wanted them and they will continue to get them. We actually tried it for a few months in Rosebery – no poached eggs on our brekky menu. It's fair to say that nearly 75 per cent of tables were like, ‘where's the poached eggs?’ The truth is, people love a classic brekky and I don't see that changing anytime soon.”
Eggs have been eaten for breakfast by all classes of western society for as long as we’ve been using forks – roughly 300 years. Back then it was logical to cook eggs in the morning, after the farmer collected them fresh. But Breakfast: The Meal wasn't a formalised part of society until the Industrial Revolution, when workers needed a hefty serve of long-lasting energy in the forms of protein and carbohydrates before slogging it out in a factory for 15 hours. Ergo, eggs on toast.
Another Aussie cafe regular, Bircher muesli, was invented
Avocado toast at Boon Cafe.
TRADE