June has 30 days. We have 30 favorite breakfast dishes
So much starts with cereal.
It’s probably the first foodstuff you turned into a meal on your own. It’s likely the first grocery item you ever had a role in selecting, thanks to advertising. Look how colorful those marshmallows look on TV! They taste like the sky! So it was your first lesson in free-market lies: No matter what the cartoon mascot promises, it all basically tastes like corn and sugar.
But corn and sugar: yum. And no other food remains acceptable for you, at any age, to pour from the package right into your face every day until it’s time to buy the next box. The only thing as easy is whatever you put in your toaster, which is why these are the things you eat for breakfast as a grown-up, if you eat breakfast at all. (And shouldn’t you? You’re a grown-up.)
There are valuable comforts in eating the same thing each morning. Line up every bowl of cereal or piece of toast you’ve eaten, and the dishes would circle the Earth, uhhh, lessee, six times. You eat this way for good reason: You don’t know what awful surprises the world dreamed up for you overnight or what terrors lie in store over the next 24 hours, so why shock your system first thing?
But cereal stops here, people. At least for a month.
The 30 days’ worth of breakfast dishes assembled here from around the metro are our favorites right now. They’re what we eat when meetings or the dictates of social nicety or the mandates of a hangover cause us to abandon home pantry for restaurant larder. (The middle ground is the bakery. We love croissants and muffins and bagels, but that’s a different project for another month.) Some of them we’d wolf down every morning if we could. And some are so good that we’d be OK if the world ended before lunch.
Because the day that happens, you don’t want your last meal to be raisin bran.
City Diner
301 Grand, 816-471-5121, thecitydinerkansascity.com
The dish: The No. 1
Price: $9.25
The first thing you notice about the City Diner’s No. 1: It has four strips of bacon. The second thing you notice: These aren’t skimpy little piggies. No, they’re boss hogs, hearty, thick, stretching out to the edge of your full plate of eggs (done your way; scrambled are light and fluffy), with hash browns (or home fries) and two slices of toast. You could order Italian sausage or ham, but why? Breakfast is for bacon, and the City Diner doesn’t pork around.
Roxanne’s Cafe
6264 Lewis, Parkville, 816-505-4431, roxannescafe.com
The dish: Chuck Wagon Special (two eggs, a hotcake or hash browns, small biscuits and gravy, four strips of bacon or two sausage patties)
Price: $7.79 (cinnamon roll, $2.79)
The Chuck Wagon Special is as sturdy as a pioneer wagon. Creamy sausage gravy covers a light biscuit, and all of it comes to you by way of waitresses who are like your favorite aunts, encouraging you to skip your dinner for dessert: a cinnamon roll, which is as big as the original Nintendo console and just as enjoyable, dripping with sweet frosting. It’s gooey and tasty, light and doughy, and a challenge to finish — you should get your photo on the wall when you do.
El Burrito Loco
900 Swift Avenue, 816-612-8383
The dish: Bacon-and-egg burrito
Price: Small, $2.75; large, $5.49
This Mexican café in North Kansas City opens six days a week at 7 a.m. to serve huevos rancheros, huevos con chorizo, and six kinds of breakfast burritos (including a vegetarian-friendly potatoes with queso or beans and cheese). The flour tortillas come tightly wrapped around generous fillings of scrambled eggs, rice, refried beans and various meats — ham, bacon, chorizo. Cuban-born Chef Jorge Perales makes them to order, so if you want your bacon crispy or extra-crispy, he’s ready. The “small” burrito isn’t small, and the more expensive grande version could pass for a Tempur-Pedic pillow.
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Blue Bird Bistro
1700 Summit, 816-221-7559, bluebirdbistro.com
The dish: Biscuits and gravy
Price: $12
A dozen singles for a classic, cheap diner breakfast seem sort of exorbitant, especially given that there’s no actual sausage in the gravy. But the thick, delicious mushroom gravy slathered over two flaky biscuits might be the meatiest nonmeat gravy in the city, and it’s worth the price. The rest of the meal includes two Campo Lindo Farm eggs (prepared any style) and a jumble of organic spuds sautéed with fresh rosemary. A cup of strong Oddly Correct coffee completes this tastefully gentrified version of a traditional two-bit breakfast.
The Classic Cookie
409 West Gregory, 816-444-1933, theclassiccookie.com
The dish: Herbed potato and sausage casserole
Price: $7.99
One of the signature breakfast items that owner Leslie Stockard introduced when she took over this former bake shop in 1998 was an unabashedly fattening mix of fried potatoes (cooked in bubbling bacon grease), sausage and cheddar cheese. Naturally, a poached egg rested on top, under a dollop of sour cream. Let’s recap: bacon-fried spuds, sausage, cheddar, egg, superfluously delicious dairy. What more do you need to know? Yes, yes, it’s served with a choice of bready stuff, and it comes in a petite casserole dish that’s dainty enough to allow the fantasy that you’ve just eaten a dainty meal.
Home Skillet
6225 Blue Ridge Boulevard, Raytown, 816-503-9146, home-skillet.com
The dish: Steak and eggs
Price: $10.99
Since opening earlier this year, this family-owned diner in Raytown has developed a following for its homemade pies and inexpensive breakfasts, which are served until the dining room closes. For breakfast, we like the platter of steak and eggs: a 7-ounce filet, nice and tender, with eggs made any style and damn good potatoes. Is there any pie left in the kitchen? That’s breakfast, too, sometimes.
Succotash
2601 Holmes, 816-421-2807, succotashkc.com
The dish: The Veggie Kitchen Sink
Price: $9
Succotash tends to do things big, so even a dish with a self-explanatory name like the Kitchen Sink errs on the side of jumbo. To wit: two eggs scrambled with spinach, onions and peppers, served on fried potatoes and topped with cheddar cheese and mushroom gravy. (Vegan and meat eaters’ versions are also available.) It sounds over-the-top, but someone has thought this through: Each ingredient holds its own while complementing and blending with the others. The base layer of thinly sliced potatoes anchors the cooked-just-right eggs and vegetables, and the gravy that tops it all off adds creaminess but stays somehow light.
Cozy’s Café
6740 West 75th Street, Overland Park, 913-236-0003, cozyscafe.com
The dish: Coconut pancake, with strawberry syrup
Price: $7.95
If you think nearly $8 seems a little steep for a single pancake, well, listen: It’s not. You get what you pay for at Cozy’s, and this worth-every-cent, dinner-plate-size cake is a superstar. The coconut in the half-inch-thick deliciousness is the coconut flour, which chef-owner Kozeta Kreka adds to the batter. Unable to procure it from suppliers, she buys the gluten-free and good-for-you ingredient — ground from dried coconut meat, low in carbs and high in fiber — from Whole Foods. Whereas giant flapjacks can sometimes be dry and crumbly, this subtly flavored cake — on the menu for the summer — is moist and light, making the accompanying strawberry syrup nearly unnecessary.
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Niecie’s
6441 Troost, 816-444-6006, nieciesrestaurant.com
The dish: Chicken and waffles
Price: $9.25
A polite server one Thursday morning at Niecie’s had a suggestion for a diner struggling to extract meaningful pieces of fried chicken with a fork and knife: Just pick it up and eat it with your hands. “I won’t tell your girlfriend,” she says. Eating Niecie’s fried chicken by hand is an easier way to enjoy this long-standing joint’s signature breakfast item, served with a face-sized waffle. The waffle batter is nothing spectacular, but it’s also not the greasy sarcophagus that many places hand you, and it lets the chicken be the chicken — the good, good chicken.
Happy Gillis
549 Gillis, 816-471-3663, happygillis.com
The dish: The Pig & Bean
Price: $9
The pork-and-bean skillet listed on Happy Gillis’ blackboard sounds basic enough: a plate full of braised pork and slow-cooked black beans, topped with a poached egg and served with a tortilla. When the dish appears, though, it’s like something from the Painted Desert, arranged with bright radish slices, chopped green onions and large twists of cilantro. The Heritage breed pork is braised in chipotle, ancho and guajillo peppers, and it is juicy and spoon-tender. The peppers’ spicy kick lands in the back of the throat and gently fades. And that egg is poached in the shell, turning the yolk into a silky, gooey sauce. Every day should start this well.
Mildred’s Coffeehouse
1821 Wyandotte, 816-471-1155, mildredscoffeehouse.com
The dish: Breakfast sandwich
Price: $5.39
Examining a menu, a diner always faces a big question: “Can I make this better at home?” It’s not all that difficult to scramble a few eggs, fry a strip or two of bacon, cut a slice of cheese, and slot the whole mess between two pieces of toast. But for most of us, the home version simply won’t taste better than what Mildred’s can make you: fresh Farm to Market bread, an unusually fluffy slab of beaten eggs, a price that lets you get it more than once a week, and a sense of fullness that lasts at least until lunch.
Beer Kitchen
435 Westport Road, 816-389-4180, beerkitchenkc.com
The dish: Red velvet waffle
Price: $8
Sometimes two incongruent things can come together and make something unexpectedly nice. Beer Kitchen embraces this thinking with what sounds like an unholy hybrid: red velvet cake plus Belgian waffle. It works. The deep-red waffle batter tastes fine by itself, but the dish is punctuated with a fresh wild-berry compote and topped with whipped cream cheese that lends a cheesecake flavor. You don’t need syrup for this.
Corner Bakery Café
11705 Roe, Leawood, 913-766-0486, cornerbakerycafe.com
The dish: Chilled Swiss oatmeal
Price: $4.29
It’s hard to find an authentic European muesli around these parts. The dry cereal sold by that name in stores isn’t the creamy and slightly sweet blend of thick goodness first developed around 1900 by a Swiss physician; it’s not that perfect combination of rolled oats, other cereal grains as desired, milk, nuts, and fruit (fresh, dried or both) that’s often soaked overnight and eaten chilled. Aficionados can create the dish from scratch or try a ready-made mix. (Bob’s Red Mill is one.) But a bowl of the real stuff can at last be had in the metro, at Leawood’s Corner Bakery. The version here — rolled oats, Granny Smith apples, lowfat yogurt, bananas, currants, cranberries and skim milk — is as bona fide as we’ve tasted. Thank you, Corner Bakery.
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Genessee Royale Bistro
1531 Genessee, 816-474-7070, genesseeroyale.com
The dish: Chicken biscuit
Price: $11
In a delightful, Southern-fried twist on a breakfast sandwich, Genessee Royale Bistro’s menu includes what the place simply calls a “chicken biscuit.” It sounds generic but doesn’t taste that way. A snow-white chicken breast with a peppery, crispy breading sits inside a bouncy, cloudlike biscuit that’s topped with country gravy and a sunny-side-up egg. The meat is tender, the biscuit baby-soft, and the gravy so luxurious that you could take a bath in it. And then you get the subtle flavor profile of the yolk. Perfect.
Room 39
1719 West 39th Street, 816-753-3939, rm39.com
The dish: Oven eggs
Price: $9 ($10.75 with truffle oil)
You’d be hard-pressed to find anything on Room 39’s menu that isn’t expertly made and rendered with an eye for detail. The cooking process for the humbly titled “oven eggs” is theoretically simple: The chef carves a hollow circle in a Farm to Market egg bun and layers in house-made salami and grùyere cheese, then bakes it for a few minutes before dropping two egg yolks on top. This invention cooks for a bit longer, giving the yolks a barely there firmness; later, when the lucky eater pokes the eggs with a fork, the yellow pushes over the edges of the roll like a cake dripping with too much frosting. Extra luxury points for the truffle oil (get it), which cuts the salty salami and balances the creamlike yolk.
Poco’s
3063 Southwest Boulevard, 816-931-2526, pocosontheblvd.com
The dish: Chilaquiles
Price: $9
Chilaquiles is one of the simplest traditional Mexican breakfast dishes — corn tortillas, fried eggs, cheese, salsa — but it can be disastrous if prepared incorrectly. That never happens at Poco’s. The menu says there are “two crispy corn tortilla strips” as the base for the dish, but that’s a little inaccurate — it’s more like half a bag of corn tortillas, cut into thick squares and drenched in red salsa and topped with sour cream. The server will ask you how you want your eggs. You want them scrambled, now and always. The chilaquiles at Poco’s eschew refried beans in favor of a heaping side of breakfast potatoes, pan-fried with onions and green peppers. That’s trading up. A word of caution: The optional hot salsa is a contender on a painful game show somewhere; sample before pouring over your breakfast.
Chez Elle
1713 Summit, 816-471-2616, chezellekc.com
The dish: the Chez Elle
Price: $9.25
If you’re looking for what most Americans understand as a crepe — one of the petite, pretty little things smothered with Nutella or whipped cream and strawberries — don’t bother the people at Chez Elle. The creperie and coffeehouse offers more than two dozen sweet, savory and breakfast crepes, most of which are more imaginative than that. Way bigger, too. The café’s namesake dish starts with a crepe that is close to 18 inches in diameter. Into that go roasted chicken, sautéed mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, wilted baby spinach, mozzarella and pesto. The crepe is folded into a triangle and topped with not-a-small spoonful of marinara, sprinkled with a little more cheese. The result is something that tastes a little more Italian-influenced than French, sort of like deep-dish breakfast pizza.
You Say Tomato
2801 Holmes, 816-756-5097, yousaytomatokc.wordpress.com
The dish: Breakfast flatbread
Price: $8.95
Cheese, meat, crust: This is basically a breakfast pizza, only the sauce is gravy, and there are eggs. This long-winning hangout just south of Hospital Hill serves quiches and various sandwiches, too, but this is probably the dish that best captures what You Say Tomato does best: flavors that blend easily with one another and go great with a bottomless cup of coffee. And, really, it’s still a breakfast dish, leaving you free to get actual pizza someplace for lunch and/or dinner.
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Westport Café and Bar
419 Westport Road, 816-931-4740, westportcafeandbar.com
The dish: Lemon ricotta pancakes (brunch only)
Price: $12
The popular lemon-ricotta pancakes at Westport Café and Bar are available only at brunch, only on Saturdays and Sundays. Damn. Or maybe that’s good. Because the delicate ovals are so light, so subtly flavored, so easily devoured, that you could forget you’re eating, you know, carby, caloric pancakes. That are delicious. More thin than thick, these properly sized, soft hotcakes come with berry compote, maple syrup and a large pat of butter that sits atop the mound and melts over and around it. The rich yet nuanced lemon and ricotta flavors meld together and don’t overpower. You’ll clean the plate before you know what happened.
The Corner Restaurant
4059 Broadway, 816-931-4401, thecornerkc.com
The dish: Swoonin’ Biscuits
Price: $6 for a half-order, $11 for a full
The Corner reopened last year, to much fanfare. But people expecting a straight reincarnation of the Westport staple, with its eminently affordable menu, complained when they saw that prices had changed with the times. The quality of the food generally justifies the inflation, though; this café’s take on biscuits and gravy is better than most offerings of the same dish around town. The peppercorn-sausage gravy has a slight kick that amplifies the biscuit’s topping. As for fair pricing: Unless you have a monster-size appetite, the half-order is seriously ample.
Town Topic
2021 Broadway, 816-842-2298, towntopic.com
The dish: Truckstop omelet
Price: $10.49 with meat, $8.49 without
The beauty of the Truckstop lies not in its presentation — this is Town Topic, after all; we’re not bellying up to the counter for artful garnishes — but in its efficiency. It provides all the classic ingredients of a heavy greasy-spoon breakfast (four eggs, hash browns, your choice of ham, bacon or sausage), cooked together into a hefty gob of first-meal goodness. Of course it’s topped with five slices of American cheese. The dish’s sheer size precludes all but the largest or the most inebriated among us from finishing it in one sitting, but a leftover Truckstop turns out to be surprisingly OK.
Aixois Bistro
251 East 55th Street, 816-333-3305, aixois.com
The dish: Croque monsieur
Price: $11
From your grandmother to your dentist, everyone swears by some hangover remedy. Maybe the only one you need to remember: the croque monsieur at Aixois. You’ve probably tasted some version of this enchanting French classic before: ham, grùyere and béchamel sauce. But Aixois has perfected this decadent sandwich: two extra-wide slices of country bread, piled with grilled French Madrange ham and imported grùyere, drenched in house béchamel — the emperor of sauces — and pan-fried like a grilled cheese. It’s topped with even more grùyere and, for $1 more, finished with a sunnyside egg, which is absolutely worth the addition. Cut into it, and the medicine flows: an intense wave of oozing, yolky, cheesy goodness. Bonus: At Aixios, the bloody mary arrives in a pint glass.
Westside Local
1663 Summit, 816-997-9089, thewestsidelocal.com
The dish: Apple-bread French toast
Price: $10
We’ve said some nice things about Westside Local lately, and the place deserves pretty much unreserved praise for having become a truly fine neighborhood restaurant. But that doesn’t mean the kind-of-unfortunate portmanteau “blunch” — what the Local calls its Sunday spread — gets a pass. Sure, nobody likes saying brunch anymore; the very concept, word and meal both, is a bourgeois cliché, even when the food is both a necessary tonic and a taste sensation. But blunch? Really? When your place makes a genius move like serving soft and sweet house-made apple bread and perfect almond butter with pieces of apple and smooth Canadian maple syrup, can’t you just say it’s on the “awesome midday you’re welcome” menu or something?
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Café Sebastienne
4420 Warwick, 816-561-7740, kemperart.org/cafe
The dish: Savory waffle
Price: $14
Everything looked good the Sunday we sat for brunch in this bustling, art-heavy space (and in our experience, everything is good), but there was never any doubt what we were going to order. A waffle is a good thing, a savory waffle a very good thing — and the savory waffle here (featuring a tangy, regionally made cheddar on this day) better still. Yes, there’s usually syrup involved, but it’s on the side for a reason. Extra sweetness isn’t necessarily your best play when the dish is so airy and yet so zingy. We did it with a poached egg and breakfast potatoes, but that was mostly to make sure we weren’t seen eating the waffle in three shameless bites.
Second Best Coffee
328 West 85th Street, secondbestcoffee.com
The dish: Breakfast burrito
Price: About $7
The coffee is slow at Second Best (it’s pour-over, give or take the outstanding espresso, pulled from a Slayer), and the breakfast burritos aren’t rocket-fast, either. As with the beverages, though, there’s art in the presentation: The breakfast wraps (they’re closer to panini, with light grill marks, and are substantial, not outlandish) come in neatly folded paper tied with twine, and you eat them off small metal trays rather than plates. They’re delicious and simple, and they fits this shop’s feel: a studied brand of reclaimed-wood rustic. The burrito fillings rotate, as do the coffee sources, but you can trust in a veggie offering and one or two socked with locally sourced meat (generally from Local Pig).
YJ’s Snack Bar
128 West 18th Street, 816-472-5533, yjs-snackbar.com
The dish: Breakfast sandwich with gravy
Price: $6.50
To eat at YJ’s Snack Bar is to surrender to a certain kind of powerlessness. There’s no real menu. What’s available varies from day to day, and sometimes the special is just scribbled on a slip of paper near the counter, like a discarded grocery list. We applaud this spontaneity, but for those seeking more stability from their dining experience, there is at least one constant at YJ’s: Between roughly midnight and noon every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, breakfast sandwiches and biscuits and gravy are readily available. Pros know to combine the two: Order the breakfast sandwich (wheat toast, eggs, cheese, bacon) with a side of spicy gravy, with its Tabasco-like kick. Better yet, just have the kitchen slather the gravy all over the sandwich and eat that sucker with a fork.
The Classic Cup
301 West 47th Street, 816-753-1840, classiccup.com
The dish: Migas
Price: $8.95
In its traditional, Spanish form, migas makes a splendid fit on the Country Club Plaza, which was designed to evoke the Spanish city of Seville. But the version of migas on Classic Cup’s breakfast menu is actually more of a Tex-Mex — which, when you think about it, also makes sense, the Plaza being a rather gringo-y part of town. We’re all for the Americanization when the product is this tasty. For $9, you get Mexican chorizo, onions and green chilies, scrambled into Campo Lindo eggs, dropped onto a bed of tortilla chips and topped with pepper jack cheese, avocado, sour cream and salsa. That’s right: You just had nachos for breakfast, and it was awesome.
Café Europa
323 East 55th Street, 816-523-1212, cafeeuropakc.com
The dish: Spinach-and-feta quiche
Price: $10
The quiche at Café Europa looks pretty unassuming, a perfectly proportioned slice in which layers of spinach float near the surface. The feta looks like it has been whipped in with the egg — there’s no visible evidence of cheese. Such is the sorcery behind one of Europa’s only permanent breakfast dishes. (Most of the menu rotates every six to eight weeks.) You think you’re playing it safe, ordering something ordinary, but one bite of this ridiculously creamy, fluffy egg bake, cooked innocently into a simple, flaky, buttery crust, and you’re under its spell.
Santa Fe Café
9946 West 87th Street, Overland Park, 913-648-5402, santa-fe-cafe.com
The dish: The Country Scrambler
Price: $8.49
Because Santa Fe Drive is one of the bigger commercial thoroughfares in downtown Overland Park, a lot of businesses in the area use “Santa Fe” in their name. But breakfast-and-lunch joint Santa Fe Café outdoes them all in terms of paying homage to its geographic inspiration. The tablecloths are of a Southwestern pattern, the servers wear polos the color of clay, and paintings of frontier cowboys on horseback dot the walls. The breakfasts, too, are fit for a cattle herder — particularly the Roundup Skillet Scramblers. We’re partial to the Country Scrambler: sausage crumbles, eggs, mushrooms, onions and green peppers, with shredded cheese sprinkled on top. If it sounds simple, it is. “The kind of cooking just like Mom” is the motto posted on Santa Fe Café’s door. But it’s the kind of unfussy dish that always hits the spot — comfort food for both mamas and the babies they let grow up to be cowboys.
Eggtc.
5107 Main, 816-561-0116, eggtckc.com
The dish: Garden of Eden frittata
Price: $8.99
There aren’t enough frittatas in this town. But the Italian dish, which lands somewhere between quiche and an omelet on the taste-texture spectrum, fits right in at Eggtc., the sister restaurant of neighboring Minsky’s Pizza and Il Centro, just south of the Plaza. The lighter of the two frittatas here features eggs with smoked salmon, goat cheese, potatoes and onions, sprinkled with basil. The heavier choice (the one we always get) is the Garden of Eden: eggs, cheddar, potatoes, broccoli, mushrooms, onions and roasted red peppers, topped with spicy salsa and basil. Picky eaters, beware: The dishes are sliced from larger frittatas, which means you can’t pick and choose what to leave in and what to leave out. Bright side: This is the morning when you come around on broccoli.
