I’ve decided to combine my love for breakfast with my lack of blogging with a new feature I call “This is how I Breakfast”. If you’ve ever been out to breakfast with me, or gotten drunk with me late at night and I’m passing out and I have nothing to do in the morning, you know how much I love going out to breakfast, especially when I’m hungover.
(note: I don’t get hungover. Well, I don’t get physically hungover. I get emotionally hungover. Which usually means I start to regret things I did the previous night, and overthink them into a depression–particularly as they pertain to women. So when I say “when I’m hungover” I mean “the morning after drinking”, not “when I’m feeling shitty”)
This past Saturday, Girlfriend and I went to Sunny Side Up on Lyndale.
I should start earlier.
This past Friday, I had to close at the store. As Assistant Manager, I’m obligated to close a few times a week, and in order to get the schedule I require for rehearsarial purposes, I had to give up Fridays, which is okay because no one does anything fun on Fridays except drink a lot and hang out all together and bid adieu to the week previous–activities I loathe. So I get off at midnight (because the dumb-ass high school fuck-off who was closing with me sucks and I hate him, and he totally tricked me into letting him go early. Never again.), and Girlfriend and I had planned ahead (take THAT, closing-on-Fridays-means-you-can’t-have-fun!) and watched Shaun of the Dead (Incidentally, I need to get my hands on a new copy of Shaun, as mine is scratched, leaving most of the Winchester scene skippy. All of a sudden, it’s like “Hold on: where’s so-and-so? Oh. Wait. Dead.”) whilst eating/drinking root beer floats (featuring tasty expensive-yet-on-sale root beer and full-fat organic expensive-yet-on-sale ice cream). Then we went to bed, and the next morning decided to go to breakfast (it was an easy decision, as one of the things Girlfriend and I like to do together is go to breakfast) (also, between going to bed and going to breakfast we slept).
She’s new to the area, so I get to introduce her to my favorite breakfast locales. I chose Sunny Side Up, because it’s close enough that the short walk was perfect for the spring weather that seems to be taking the upper midwest by surprise (seriously, folks, it happens every year) (ugh, just kidding. We tredge through winter all together, and the one thing we have in common is how fucking happy we are to not shiver at noon, so we celebrate, and when we encounter strangers, we talk about the weather. It’s a tradition of humanity for the past dillion years. I’m happy about it, too.). Also because I like their food.
I’ve discovered something about the sometimes-daunting lines that form at breakfast spots: they move quickly. Breakfast is a relatively fast-paced meal (hence the “fast” part (this is not true)). And unless you’re actually painfully starving, you can use those few minutes to get hungrier, because you’ve committed yourself to eating at this one place, and you can actually smell the food, most of the time you can see the food, and you can think about what thing you want to get. This Saturday was no exception.
Their coffee is nothing to scream about. For me, there are two kinds of coffee: the kind you drink black, and the kind you add cream and sugar to. I added cream and sugar to their coffee.
I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten anything different from Sunny Side Up. Because the first thing I got there was so fucking good, and I go there rarely enough that I don’t very well feel the need to get different things. Because that shit is tasty. As soon as I told Girlfriend what I was getting she exclaimed “I knew you were going to get that!” as if I’m predictable or some shit. Turns out I’m into pork (I shrug, then I realize that I am, in fact, into pork. What can I say? It’s the other white meat). So I got the Cowboy Tort, which is mostly a pork (!) green chili, between corn tortillas (something else I’m into), with some cheese and eggs on top, and refried beans on the side (that they stick little corn chips in, for no reason, like sails in an ocean of refried beans).
Here’s the rub: everyone tells me that the stuff they get there is “nothing special”, but I totally dig the tort, and that makes me want to go back, and bring people, and enjoy. Dunno.
One thing I dig about Sunny Side Up is that their portions tend to be generous, but not gluttonous. Other breakfast spots in this fair city make fuckin’ tasty food, but ridiculous amounts of it. Sunny Side does not do this. Portions are bigger than they need to be, but not overly-so. Girlfriend did not finish her biscuits & gravy (which was made with italian sausage, which is an interesting choice, and the few bites I had were good, although I prefer the classic “breakfast sausage” flavor in my b&g.), but this comes as no surprise because she never finishes her food when we go out (I would complain that she’s just trying to make two meals out of the one that I’m paying for, but she tends to also leave her leftovers at my place, and tells me to eat them, or doesn’t tell me anything and I eat them anyway).
In short: the Cowboy Tort is the shit. I’m going to give the arbitrary rating of 10 eggs (out of a possible dozen)
