We’re told a good breakfast is an important meal. Personally, I’ve always counted breakfast among my top three meals of the day.
Certainly, the topic stirs interest. I’m asked quite often about good breakfast spots, probably more than for the latest chef tasting menu luxury meal. Breakfast just has that everyman appeal.
And let’s be clear, the call for breakfast is distinct from brunch, with its later hours and eye-opener cocktails. We have a lot of brunch spots in New Orleans because we have a lot of tourists.
For those with less leisurely morning schedules, breakfast has to be straightforward, swift, hopefully unmessed with or at least a smart remake of the old standbys.
So with that in mind I’ve been on the hunt for new spots for the morning meal, and can report that some turn up in unexpected corners.
Dough Nguyeners is a unlikely name for a new Vietnamese bakery in Gretna making breakfast banh mi and donuts with Vietnamese iced coffee glaze. Downtown, there’s District All Day Delicious, set up like a modern diner and also Luzianne Café, which is the restaurant extension of the local Reily Foods Brand, maker of Blue Plate mayo and CDM coffee and lots of other labels. Try the breakfast sandwich on a biscuit made from cake flour.
A little more out there, but quite tasty, is the Uptown breakfast spot called Scrambled. You can get a plate of eggs and bacon, fantastic house-cured lox, but much of the menu is about playfully creative dishes, some are so rich they could send you back to bed.
In Metairie, the tortilla maker Mawi has Central American breakfast plates that work in chicharrons and chorizo and crema and use pliant, fresh corn tortillas the way another place would use toast.
Speaking of Toast, that’s the name of a great breakfast restaurant with locations in Gentilly, the French Quarter and now this new one in Gretna, where there’s a playground in the patio the size of a pocket park for the kids to run off all that syrup.
There’s a lot out there people, so make like an egg and let’s get cracking.
