Cleaver & Cork to introduce late-night happy-hour breakfast in March

Set your clocks for 10 p.m. Friday, March 4.

That’s the evening when Cleaver & Cork restaurant, at 1333 Walnut in the Power & Light District, introduces their “Breakfast for Dinner” reverse happy hour, from 10 p.m. to midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Look for a limited menu of four or five breakfast dishes (which may rotate weekly) served with Roasterie coffee and special cocktails.

“It’s not just a way to stand out from the competing happy hours in this neighborhood,” says managing partner Eric Willey. “It also gives us an opportunity to experiment with the breakfast dishes we’ll be adding to our brunch menu when we kick that off in May.”

The first Cleaver & Cork Sunday brunch will be offered on Mother’s Day (May 8). The brunch menu will be served from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. After May 8, the restaurant plans to offer brunch every Sunday.

“We want to be the hangover brunch,” Willey says.

Willey has been talking about wanting to serve an off-menu Sunday brunch since Cleaver & Cork opened a year ago — the venue celebrates its first anniversary with an event on February 28 — but says he wanted to get the restaurant on steady footing before launching an additional meal on a day that the restaurant is traditionally closed. (When brunch service starts in May, Cleaver & Cork will only serve brunch on Sundays, closing well before dinner service.)

John Prange, who operates as sous chef under the direction of Alex Pope, has experimented with late-night breakfast dishes at Cleaver & Cork before (including cornflake-crusted chicken sliders and salted-caramel French toast sticks with bourbon maple syrup) and had a resounding response. 

“We just had to get our kitchen ready to take on a different menu for the weekend-only reverse happy hours,” says Prange, who is particularly proud of his spin on poutine — the French fry-and-gravy classic — which he prepares from fingerling potatoes that are roasted, then fried, then baked with chubby cheese curds and slices of Local Pig sausage.

And yes, there will be valet parking for patrons who are truly hungover.