Blue Plate Kitchen
West Hartford
Febr. 28, 2024
What is a breakfast food?
Simple enough question, but there are as many different answers as there are people to ask. Is breakfast food defined by time? Is whatever you eat when you break your overnight fast fair game as breakfast food? Or is it defined by style, as in the kinds of food typically made at breakfast time are breakfast foods?
I contemplated all of these questions, and more, as I sat in a large booth at the Blue Plate Kitchen in West Hartford. I was surprised to see so many people in the restaurant during late morning on a work day, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been. I was there, too, after all.
First things first, I started with some orange juice. OJ is a real conundrum to me. I’ve always loved orange juice, but I recently learned that many orange juices are reflavored after being stored. Another of my childhood illusions was shattered that day, but I was left wondering: What does orange juice actually taste like?
In any case, the orange juice at the Blue Plate was good, whatever the source of its flavor. And it came in a cool jar to boot.
After a brief wait, the food came out and it looked delicious. The home fries were well seasoned and cooked well without being overdone. The eggs were exactly what they are: eggs. Of all the breakfast foods, I don’t understand why eggs prepared solo have been banished to the morning time. Eggs are an essential ingredient in so many dishes that it almost seems counterintuitive that they never show up as a side for any non-breakfast meal. You already have them there to make the main dish. Why not fry up a few on the side?
I had some grits too. There’s probably no breakfast dish more revealing of a cook’s skill than grits. They’re easy to make, but also deceptively easy to mess up as well. The grits were the best side by far at this meal. They were creamy, with just the right amount of salt and pepper and enough cheese to be welcome but not obnoxious.
I’d been craving a country-fried steak for weeks, and Blue Plate did not disappoint. What I enjoy about country-fried steak is the saltiness. Steak is a heavy meat, and the relatively thin steak used for breakfast can still overpower even an intensive cooking process like frying if not done well. So in my experience, the best country-fried steaks are well seasoned to balance the steakiness of the meat and the potential heaviness of the fry. Blue Plate had seasoned the batter to perfection, and it melded together the tastes of meat and frying perfectly. The gravy was good too.
As I was eating, my mind started to wonder again. What constitutes a breakfast steak versus a dinner steak? Is it the size? In that case, why is strip steak acceptable for dinner but not breakfast? Is it the manner of preparation? When I thought about it, I’d never seen country fried steak offered outside of a breakfast menu. That had to be the difference, right?
I tried some of the Blue Plate’s special home-fry bowls, settling on the Kitchen Sink Skillet which, as the name implies, comes with everything but: home fries topped with scrambled eggs, sausage, ham, peppers, tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, Monterey Jack cheese, bacon and toast.
Now this meal is definitely not breakfast food. Take away the eggs and change how the potatoes are prepared and this could be a dinner entree anywhere in America. Which lends weight to the conclusion I drew about the steak. It really is about how you prepare the food for breakfast, not what you make.
The skillet was savory, with the various flavors mixing well but definitely coming in beneath the combination of peppers and onions. The skillet led to another realization about breakfast food, that it tends towards the sweet instead of savory in most cases. The only complaint about the skillet I could entertain is that there wasn’t enough meat in relation to the other ingredients.
Finally, I ended with the quintessential breakfast food: pancakes. There’s really no discussion here. Pancakes are breakfast, and whenever you eat pancakes, you’re having breakfast, regardless of the time of day. One of the times I would get the most irrationally excited as a kid was when my mother informed us that we were having pancakes for dinner, because it felt like breaking a long-established taboo. Pancakes? At night?!
They were fluffy and tasted good, and the house’s cinnamon brown sugar syrup was incredible. I like my pancakes to have a crispy edge though, and these pancakes lacked that.
Overall, I left full of good food and some answers for a change. Breakfast is as breakfast does, and anything can be breakfast food, as long as it’s cooked the breakfast way.
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The Blue Plate Kitchen is open seven days a week.
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