The bakers’ “crusty bread” ($4.95) – a heavy loaf with a deeply toasted, beautifully cracked crown and taught, rustic belly – is my new high water mark for the daily slice. Referred to by Russians as “serii” (grey), this type of dark bread is a meeting point between German and Russian traditions. The body of the bread is satisfyingly dense. Its flavor is low on rye, slightly sour, slightly salty and subtly aromatic – as if fresh black tea had been baked into the dough. Taken with high-fat, sweet cream butter and a cup of tea, it’s sustenance of a kind sorely lacking on American breakfast tables.

Brighton Bazaar
1007 Brighton Beach Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11235
718.769.1700

Brockton Villa is not an exception. This cliffside cafe is everything La Jolla stands for, with old white people eating noveau-Californian cuisine and looking out onto the cove. Nothing about the restaurant bucks this fact, but sometimes there’s a food item on a menu that crosses the lines of class warfare. That fact is obvious every time I walk into a hole-in-the-wall taqueria to find white businessmen in nice suits, glossy magazines in hand (and an article written by Jonathan Gold within). It’s also true in the case of Brockton Villa, where students brave the bourgeois for a taste of French Toast in the morning. It’s a worthwhile trip across the picket line; the custard within crust is more dessert than breakfast, more decadent than decent, and more creamy than any La Jolla sunset.

Brockton Villa
1235 Coast Blvd
La Jolla, CA 92037

Considering how cold this town gets during the winter months, every building downtown would do well to follow suit, and Heaven on Seven – a seventh-floor coffee shop-turned blue plate, southern-style restaurant – provides more than enough justification. Marked out front as a footnote to the building’s business tenants and located next to a humdrum diamond depot, this cozy, half-kitschy parlor operates with the verve of a bustling diner.

It also serves the only dish that I decided to order twice during my week in Chicago. Heaven on Seven’s “grilled corn bread with red bean and eggs” ($9.95) – served with poached eggs during the breakfast hour and with fried eggs at all other times – is as comforting as it sounds, and masterfully cooked to boot. The red beans, barely tipping past the soothing, melted juncture between overcooked and refried, are tender and robustly seasoned. The corn bread, with hefty, crunchy, deeply browned edges and a cake-like crumble, delivers more care than is typically entitled.

Is it really cajun? I couldn’t say for sure, unless “cajun” translates to “clean plate.”

Heaven on Seven
111 N. Wabash Ave. Ste. 700
Chicago, IL 60602
312.263.6443

Then there are times when everything that makes diners great intersects with everything that makes food great. Diners by their nature cut quality for convenience, but every once in awhile there’s an exception, like Jodie’s, like Lois, like Tokyo 7-7 (R.I.P.), and it’s those kinds of exceptions that keep me trolling the eaten path instead of learning how to cook. It’s those kinds of exceptions that I live for, and one of those exceptions can be found in a corner diner in a corner bowling alley at the corner of Mar Vista in West Los Angeles. Pepy’s Galley is like any other of L.A.’s Mexican-American breakfast greasy spoons, though it’s better than most, an unlikely quality of cookery for a place that you might walk into wearing bowling shoes.

But on Wednesdays Pepy’s can be more than just an above average breakfast spot, because on Wednesdays, the special is Corned Beef Hash. Soft, large chunks of corned beef laugh in the face of the word diced. Blackened edges add just enough crisp and charred flavor to balance the fatty meat with gooey egg. Round it out with coffee and potatoes – I’m sure it doesn’t get any better.

Pepy’s Galley
12125 Venice Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90066

The fact that my two favorite dishes sampled to date are soups speaks to the core competence of M. Wells’ cooks. The breakfast menu’s egg tomato pot ($8), starting with a rich and hearty tomato stew in a tidy ceramic bowl, proves that there’s still room for restaurants to infuse creativity into comfort. A single egg, a hefty splash of pesto, and a sprinkle of parmesan are baked into the surface, layering flavor and richness over the already superb, slow-cooked soup. A crusty baguette stuck into the bowl makes this a meal, one I that would love to make at home but that I’ll enjoy just as much at a sun-bathed dining counter in Long Island City.

M. Wells
21-17 49th Ave
Long Island City, NY 11101
718.425.6917
Brunch served Tues-Sun, 10a.m.-3p.m.

While Girlfriend and I weren’t out touring Boston at the end of April, we rested our heads in nearby Somerville. The neighborhoods of this town, bordering three major universities and cradling the last stretch of the Red Line out of Boston, have been through more than one wave of history – including the familiar story of gentrification.

As such, it seemed fitting to take sips of strong Turkish coffee at Istanbul’lu, a young, charming Turkish restaurant between Davis Square and Teele Square. Refined enough to feel high-end and suburban enough to feel familiar, Istanbul’lu was a refreshing taste of immigrant cuisine that required neither travail nor translation to be digested.

Haydari was one of the house’s many tasty uses of Turkish yogurt, which found its way into almost all of our dishes. This “cold tapas” presentation was little more than a luscious, high-fat yogurt, strained until stand-up thick and seasoned with crushed garlic and chopped dill.

Topped with a drizzle of melted butter, a sprinkle of dried red pepper, and a pinch of fresh mint, it made a happy partner to Istanbul’lu’s fluffy, buttery house bread – though not as stellar as the house’s complementary garlic-and-red pepper sauce. It was also perfectly fine eaten one creamy spoonful at a time; the subtleties of the dish’s seasoning added just the right layer of extra flavor to the simple pleasure of well-prepared yogurt.

I’ve read that beyaz is actually a form of cheese made from fresh sheeps’ milk, but Istanbul’lu’s menu lists the filling for its kirmizi beyaz as suzme, the same strained yogurt prepared as the base for haydari. Whatever was lost in my translation, this particular sample was closer to a whipped cream cheese than savory feta, noticeably tangier and lighter than its full-bore counterpart. Used to stuff a delicate roasted pepper and laid over melted butter, it was simple, satisfying, and (sadly) short-lived.

Mucver, a fritter constructed from finely chopped zucchini, carrot, egg, beyaz and smattering of herbs and spices, is one of the restaurant’s most popular dishes. Pan-fried to a deep brown crisp, rested on a mound of yogurt and paired with a single slice of red tomato, the mucver at Istanbul’lu is home cooking, perfectly elevated to white-tablecloth status. The fritter itself shows off a fantastic balance between crunchy crust and fluffy core, while the dollop of yogurt and streak of tomato juice round out each bite with graceful calculation.

The soup menu’s paca (pronounced “pahtch-ah”) does just as much in the opposite direction, offering a straightforward lamb soup for the soul. Rich as a concentrated serving of lamb bone extract should be, this soup was boosted by yogurt and sharpened by garlic. Scraps of lamb meat and fat at the bottom of the bowl punctuate the paca’s essential character, a gratitude to home cooking that makes Istanbul’lu more than just an edible import into a nice neighborhood.

Home-bred character was in equally high supply at The Neighborhood, a Portugese-American diner that’s been serving all-day breakfast at the foot of Somerville’s Prospect Hill for almost 30 years.

Upon placing our orders we were immediately offered a complement of either a baked apple or a bowl of cream of wheat. Girlfriend, confused by this sudden, off-the-menu decision, asked our Boston-bound waiter to explain.

“Cream of wheat,” he responded, making a spooning motion from an invisible bowl to his jaw. “It’s a hot cereal.”

We all chose the baked apple. Cored, filled with butter and cinnamon, then baked to a mash and glazed with maple syrup, it was a bit heavy as an appetizer, but not so sweet or heavy that it couldn’t be polished off in just a few bites.

For eight bucks, I was then handed a platter of grilled linguica, home fries from scratch, three fried eggs, and a whole grilled banana.

My home fries were just barely crusty and tasted of butter and salt without being heavy, greasy or over-salted. My eggs delivered their nondescript lines without a second thought to creativity. My Portugese sausage was true to form, with a snappy casing and a juicy, fall-apart filling. The Neighborhood’s grilled banana, tender and overripe, snubbed dill pickle spears everywhere with its sweet, caramelized edges. This was the American breakfast dream, realized just as splendidly by the Borges family as it has been by other favorites of mine, like Ann’s Kitchen and Stage Restaurant.

The Neighborhood confirms its destination status with an outstanding plate of blueberry pancakes. This particular short stack wasn’t as crisp on the edges or as fluffy and airy on the inside as the platonic perfect pancake my childhood memory often fools me into chasing. Still, these moist, berry-stuffed pancakes had sides just crisp enough to lead us right into another bite, and before we knew it, we were left with a faint puddle of maple syrup.

Eating within big city limits, it’s easy to forget that suburban living doesn’t necessarily equate to culinary surrender. If the Flushings, Westminsters and Somervilles of the world are any indication, I’ll have plenty to look forward to when it’s time to think about leaving suck city for good.

Sunday doughnuts were a gift to all, an adult’s admission to her child that yes, bad foods taste good, and we all deserve a bite now and then. And in southern California, doughnut shops – invariably run by immigrants seeking a foothold in local business – were the American intersection of class and craft over Formica tables, pink cardboard boxes and small styrofoam cups. To my faithless eyes, the doughnut counter was a holy place, where people of all colors and car models shared five minutes of small talk as their fingers sauntered from one doughnut to the next.

The newest wave of fancy doughnuts in this town attempts to elevate the doughnut to gourmet status. In the case of Doughnut Plant‘s raised doughnuts, this means plastering gummy, dried-out doughnuts with overwrought glazes. Their “fresh strawberry” is nice enough as a frosting, but in a New York minute it’s revealed as little more than sugar shock. Biting into this one feels like eating a doughnut straight out of an episode of The Simpsons.

The toasted sesame glaze has a more distinctive flavor, but its accompanying doughnut is still clunky, with no spring to its texture and a marked lack of fluffiness. Doughnut Plant’s raised doughnuts exemplify why I used to avoid raised doughnuts altogether, and no measure of inventive topping or filling will change that fact when I’m paying $2-$3 a pop.

Cake doughnuts, however, are Doughnut Plant’s strong suit, and this oatmeal cake is a marvel. Balancing sweet, toasted, nutty and fruity flavors, it’s also texturally complex; between the bits of toasted oat, salt-inflected crust, and morsels of fruit baked into the dough, it’s nothing short of a baker’s masterpiece.

In gaining my respect, Doughnut Plant loses my loyalty. Its best cakes – the chocolate “blackout,” the tres leches, and the creme brulee – stray just far enough from what I connect to as the American doughnut to make me feel awkward using the word “doughnut” to describe them. I like cake, but I have no use for ring-shaped cakes with a doughnut hook when what I really want is a box of crusty old-fashioneds, a mug of coffee, and a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Brooklyn’s Dough makes a much better case for the fancy doughnut. No less gourmet than Doughnut Plant, the $2 raised doughnuts at Dough carry themselves with the same decadent vibe, as evidenced by the ring of grease that turned this sheet of waxed paper into my window to weight gain.

One bite into Dough’s hibiscus raised doughnut reveals something fundamentally different. Far from re-branded cake or dressed-up mediocrity, it’s truly a yeast doughnut on another level: moist yet fluffy, with an almost crisp exterior and just enough spring to make each bite last until it melts onto the tongue. The hibiscus frosting has a bright, fruity flavor that starts with a tart punch, then offers a brief brush of sweetness before receding perfectly into the wonderful, familiar flavor of fried, yeast-raised dough.

Likewise, Dough’s lemon poppy is a pronounced twist on a traditional glazed raised. Not as in-your-face-fruity as the hibiscus doughnut, but essentially following the same approach, its tart lemon flavor rides a wave of sugar with a sense of restraint. The proportion of glaze to doughnut ultimately emphasizes the doughnut, not the glaze, and this substantial tire of a doughnut is good enough on its own for this approach to be a winner.

Dough’s chocolate earl grey drapes a hefty coat of milk chocolate frosting on top of an already hefty doughnut, making this one impossible to imagine as a morning ritual. Still, it’s suitably luscious as a midday dessert. A brush of aromatic earl grey is present in the frosting on its own, but once it merges with the doughnut, subtleties vanish and it becomes an oversized paean to the chocolate frosted rings I would eye from across the counter as a kid.

Dough’s doughnut holes are the best option for those looking to take the greasy edge off of the full-sized rings. Like a good batch of homemade hush puppies, they’re pleasingly irregular, and one of Dough’s homages to the doughnut’s simplicity. Paying $1.00 for four of these might stab at my strip-mall-raised heart, but in a doughnut shop with this much character, I’m more than happy to point at the basket and add a few to my order.

I don’t doubt that fancy doughnuts can be incredibly delicious, but my favorite doughnuts – fancy or not – are still the ones that inspire a sense of common uplift. When things come full fried circle, I’ll remember the doughnuts that elevate not the dough, but the customer – just as they did, dozens at a time, on the shelves of my own Americana.

I didn’t know it was acceptable to use those words until my first visit to Blue Sky Bakery, a modest hallway of a bake shop just a few steps from where I lay my head in Park Slope. A muffin and coffee from Blue Sky quickly became my last-resort breakfast on weekdays and my after-breakfast bite on weekends.

Early this afternoon I noshed my way to my first free muffin and coffee from the bakery, a gift offered for anyone who brings his muffin card to the counter a dozen times. Have I been to any other New York eatery a dozen times in the past two years? Aside from Peter Pan Bakery and Minca ramen, it’s highly unlikely. It’s the best $3.50 I can recommend spending between dawn and lunchtime.

Danny once referred to Blue Sky’s blueberry muffin as “life-altering,” and I have to agree. Biting into one of these beauts redefines the word “muffin” for anyone used to dense clumps of chewy cake batter, sugar-crusted lumps of oil, and joyless heaps of bran that seem to be forged in black holes of dryness.

Like that of an artisanal bread, a hefty, well-defined crust encases Blue Sky’s muffin. A thin coat of sugar brushed atop glistens just slightly on a sunny morning, and when your teeth penetrate the surface they’re met with a confident crunch. Each tray’s innards differs slightly, but the classic varieties share a moist, fluffy texture that never dips into the excess of cake.

Blue Sky’s fillings sit in the center of the muffin, more often then not still warm when served in simple pairings and trios. Cranberry and peach; blueberry and sweet plum; zucchini, raspberry and chocolate; pumpkin, apple and walnut; and an endless string of other combinations strike with a freshness and purpose impossible to imagine in the stock muffins sitting behind the glass display at the local coffee shop.

Even Blue Sky’s bran muffins are heavenly. Just look at that glorious crust!

Though noticeably more heavyset than their white-flour sisters, these muffins somehow feel less dense; their texture is porous, spongy and moist. Where one would normally brace for the dry, crumbly and insipid charms of ye olde bran muffin-shaped conscience soother, Blue Sky offers a nutty, grainy and all-around pleasant way to bid last night’s post-beer French fries adieu.

Every so often I step in to Blue Sky and order something that is not a muffin. Particularly nice are the bakery’s croissants, which I’ve praised in the past as a light, buttery antidote to the shitty croissant blues. They’re not as life-altering as the muffins, but they earn just as much karma for protecting the sanctity of a baker’s classic.

My favorite muffin among the Blue Sky roster is anything made with pumpkin, so I sprang for this pumpkin, raspberry and pecan treat when free muffin day came about. It’s my perfect mate to a black dark roast – slightly sweet, slightly aromatic, slightly spiced, plenty nutty and punctuated by the occasional tartness of half-liquified raspberry.

It was this Tuesday’s breakfast of last resort, but even as food on the go it forced a pause for every bite. After all, this was the best god damned muffin I’ve ever eaten.

Blue Sky Bakery
53 5th Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11217
718.783.4123

That said, it would be impossible for me to pay a visit to my hometown in San Gabriel Valley without indulging in its edible bounties, and I could think of no better destination than the Taiwanese breakfast table. While I’ve written about Shanghainese/Taiwanese breakfast in New York, the weekend trips that my Taiwanese American friends would make to places like Four Sea Restaurant were not etched into my appetite until now.

The mascot of this meal, you tiao, was done right here; our crisp, fluffy, dog-bone-shaped doughnuts lacked the slick of grease that comes with a regrettable plate of fried dough. Their true potential, though, was fulfilled in Four Sea’s fan tuan. Tender, chewy grains of sticky rice, scrunched, crispy-not-oily you tiao, and strongly flavored shreds of dried pork that moisten like meat-based cotton candy hit the elusive balance that makes any food greater than the sum of its parts – a good case for “perfect food” if I’ve ever tasted one. A dessert option, substituting powdered sugar for pork floss, was also available, though not quite as divine.

Savory lou bo gao (steamed and stir-fried radish cake), could have been a dense, starchy letdown, but Four Sea’s cooks delivered these cakes to us entirely crisp on the edges and just thick enough for us to enjoy their creamy consistency without chewing through a mouthful of radish paste.

Other staples of the Taiwanese breakfast menu were more of a mixed bag. Beef-filled shao bing (pancakes) were downright decadent in their flakiness, much more of a puff pastry than the more flat-bread-like renditions I’ve come to expect. The joint’s dan bing, even given a sloppy spatula flip that left the pancake-to-egg ratio severely lopsided, was a solid choice. Meat-and-veg-stuffed baozi (steamed buns) were comparatively lackluster, as was Four Sea’s xian dou jiang, a sloppy take on salty soy milk that muddled delicate flavors and textures into a mainly soggy soup.

The surprise hit of our breakfast feast was Four Sea’s “fried meat filled” pancake, a pork-and-chive pastry with impeccably alternating layers of crispy, chewy and tender dough. I admittedly have limited experience with the world of daikon-based hash brown patties, double-starch sandwiches and all-encompassing breakfast miracles like this pancake, but I can only dream of a world where morning meals get any better than this.

I suppose that world is Taipei, but until I can afford a flight to the hungry island, San Gabriel Valley will do just fine.

Four Sea Restaurant
2020 South Hacienda Boulevard
Hacienda Heights, CA 91745
626.330.3088

Then cut that table in half length-wise, and on the side where nobody is sitting, add a kitchen. Now it’s a diner counter.

Even if everyone at that counter is a stranger eating alone, they are sharing a meal at the same table, with each other, and with the restaurant’s employees working in front of them. In a weird way, for the span of one meal, each is part of the others’ lives just as if they were relatives at Thanksgiving dinner.

My favorite breakfast spot during my years in Berkeley was little more than a breakfast counter. Makris Cafe on University Ave isn’t the most popular place around campus, but as someone who enjoys dining alone, I visited frequently – with notepad or newspaper in hand – for some eggs, coffee and uninterested company.

Makris had a staff of two and a half. Han, the husband, manned the griddle, too busy to ever turn around. His wife, who dealt with the customers, spoke each order in his ear as their ‘tween daughter, on the busiest days, helped out by refilling coffees and learning how to use the outdated cash register. As husband, wife and daughter work hard to keep the business afloat, the financial needs of a family working two feet from their patrons are part of the process as well.

On one hand, it’s a bit unnerving, like standing outside of their home window as a cloaked voyeur. On the other hand, I believe that meals have more value when there’s a connection between chef, server and customer, even if that relationship is based only on proximity. It cuts out the middleman and becomes a barter between a hungry stranger and a family business that needs patronage. The awareness of that exchange adds a certain honesty to each bite, and it’s that stripped-down style of dining that made Makris my go-to fried egg dispenser in college.

In other words, I love breakfast counters. That’s why, upon stepping inside Art’s Cafe, a restaurant consisting of only one long breakfast counter, I instantly liked what I saw. It didn’t hurt that Art’s is also run by a Korean family.

A tiny storefront sandwiched between bigger buildings on the pedestrian-thick Irving Blvd, Art’s Cafe is easily passed by unnoticed. During weekdays, the long counter waits mostly empty for the occasional walk-in. On weekends, a line gathers out front waiting for the rare vacant stool. Each patron is greeted by the woman, offered coffee and left to examine the myriad postcards beneath the counter glass, gifts from Art’s many fans and a testament to the value of a friendly place to eat. The meal is accompanied by the smell of hot bacon grease, heat from the kitchen, and the percussion of spatulas and frying pans.

The main difference between Makris Cafe and Art’s Cafe is that the latter is more successful, and the primary reason for that is its food. While Han knew how to fry an egg, the menu at Art’s has more to offer, and an efficient kitchen keeps the customer turnover high. Despite the tiny space, success has allowed Art’s to hire additional kitchen help and buy better equipment. More rice cookers. Bigger toasters. Cleaner griddles. A website. Makris may have Art’s beat on the Dickensian scoreboard, but when comparing quality, my five dollars are better spent on Art’s corned beef hash.

The black sheep of Art’s menu are the hash brown sandwiches, which are basically quesadillas made with hash browns instead of tortillas. Like the corned beef hash, Art’s hash browns are an ultra-thin and surprisingly uniform version of what I would normally expect, which works perfectly as the casing to your choice of filling. Even if these novelties don’t add up to anything more than the sums of their parts, they’re priced to move.

Asian influences on the breakfast menu come in the form of white rice and teriyaki. The latter of which features in one of Art’s more popular dishes, the Samurai Omelet. On the lunch menu, next to burgers and melts, folks can choose from some griddle-Korean food as well.

Everything I’ve tried at Art’s thus far has rated at a solid B, decent food made as well as possible with a limited kitchen and cheap ingredients. Art’s deserves every bit of the success displayed in postcard form – if not for the food, than for being an above-average, mom-and-pop breakfast counter.

Those postcards weren’t sent from all over the world to Art’s for the food, after all. They were sent to the people on the other side of the halved Thanksgiving table, because when it comes to breakfast over the counter, “family” might not be a strong enough a word.