West Egg Wonderful

Savvy holiday shoppers know the place to go for the best breakfast on the Miracle Mile is West Egg. Located a few blocks off Chicago's Michigan Avenue, West Egg is one of those breakfast places that just makes you happy.

Having worked seven years in the restaurant industry, watching the machinery of West Egg is pure joy for me. It's one of those extremely busy breakfast places that gets a ton of people in and out fast, runs like clockwork, and is remarkably clean and polite for the high traffic it supports.

Breakfast diners like this are models of efficiency that make me long for those restaurant days when the people you worked with knew what move each other were going to make next and just flowed together like a single unit. Throw in some cozy restaurant charm and an actual u-shape diner bar and you've got the potential for breakfast heaven.

For anyone who's not worked in the restaurant industry (seems like most of America anymore) West Egg offers terrific, fast service and positively delicious breakfasts. I tested them all three mornings I was in Chicago and not a single one was a disappointment.

I started on the first day with a standard restaurant test. I like to order either a restaurant's signature dish or their simplest dish. In the case of a breakfast place, that's poached eggs (though almost no one offers them anymore) or sunny-side-up. These are simple eggs that can be fantastic given proper treatment or awful if they're just dished to you as an after-thought (eh... sunny-side up? f' this guy.)

I can report my poached eggs were both hot and lovingly treated; while not the best I've ever had (poached egg fans know what i'm talking about... the poached egg with a warm, creamy yoke , about the consistency of room temperature corn syrup) they were still pretty outstanding. The english muffins and tomato wheels served with most egg dishes at West Egg were a perfect match. I also had some perfectly cooked bacon (thick cut that's cooked to just below crisp, so it's that melange of crumbly and chewy), and french toast. God damn the french toast was good. Almost meaty and hearty.

The next day I found my sunny-side-up eggs to be equally delightful.

True to form (and I find this to be true at all great breakfast places, I wonder why?) the coffee was sub-par. I'll never understand why that is, but the most fantastic breakfast places are serving that awful bunn-coffee-maker-coffee that's either burnt to hell or tastes like the machine hasn't been cleaned since the Eisenhower administration. Thankfully, the food at a place like West Egg is simply so fantastic, you dump some cream in and really don't care.

A last item and this is the wonderful cherry on the sundae of this place... The orange juice was fresh squeezed. On a bracingly cold day in early December, West Egg kept me satisfyingly warm all day.