Breakfast deliciousness

Man, I totally should have posted about this on Sunday, but I got all caught up in that chicken fight thing. Anyhow, we tried a new breakfast place on Sunday and oh my God...

So we Chickens have been fans of breakfast for a long time. Well, to be honest I think I'm more the big fan and Paige just humors me, but whatever. When we first shacked up back in the day we'd go Graze at Mae's up on Phinney Ridge. Then in the mid-90s the lines at Mae's got to be annoyingly long so we started hitting Beth's down on Aurora. But eventually the novelty of a 12-egg omelette was outweighed by the lingering stench of stale cigarettes and we moved on again. By then we were living in Broadview, so we tried out the Rickshaw purely for the novelty of eating an American breakfast in a Chinese restaurant, but again the smoke chased us out. Then it was on to the Salmon Bay Cafe in Ballard, Cindy's Pancake House on Aurora, and finally Pete's Egg Nest on Greenwood.

We loved (and still love) Pete's because it's homey, they do a Greek omelette that Paige loves, and the bacon is wonderful (only place I've ever been asked how I'd like my bacon prepared). The drawback is that it's small, and on the weekends the wait can be as long or longer than Mae's.

Well, this weekend we flipped Egg Nests and headed to Patty's Eggnest down on Holman Road (it's next to the QFC in a space that used to be a Burgermaster). And, as I said before, oh my God. The wait was reasonable (probably 5 minutes max at 10:30 on Sunday), the service was relatively prompt, but the food was great. I went with the standard eggs up, toast, sausage and hash browns - hard to screw up, yet nicely tasty. While the browns were a bit soggy in the middle that wasn't a huge detractor. The toast was thick Texas-style wheat bread, the eggs were nicely runny, and the sausage looked hand made (meaning it wasn't just Jimmy Dean links or something). Logan went with his standard short stack of pancakes, which appeared to be very pancakey. Paige and Maya ordered the berry French Toast which was also Texas-style and smothered in berry sauce (a mix of blueberries and raspberries with maybe a few blackberries thrown in for good measure) and what Paige called "the best whipped cream ever." Basically dessert on a plate.

So, have we shifted egg nests for good? Well, Patty's definitely has it's advantages: better parking, more tables, shorter wait, and damn fine whipped cream. But Pete's has it's perks too...we like the atmosphere and the family-run feeling. And the bacon...can't discount the bacon. That said, Patty's is closer, and we've got a couple gift certificates for it, so in the short run I think they win.