Weekend Brunch

[txaggie]

Have brunch at either Morning Glory (on Fitzwater between 9th and 10th) or Sabrina's (910 Christian St) or both. A few blocks from each other, both are located in South Philly, and Sabrina's is right around the corner from DiBruno Brothers and a cool spice shop. Morning Glory is my favorite brunch place; cjsadler would recommend Sabrina's.

[mdt]

Honey's Sit n' Eat at 800 N Fourth St. Go for brunch and enjoy.

[SrtaJRosa]

Mother's Day 2008. My mom and I walked from her home in Powelton Village to the London Grill on Fairmount Ave. It was a great vista seeing everything from the Art Museum to the Spring Garden St. bridge and everything else in between.

We arrived for brunch to a place which had gotten pretty good reviews for the brunch but were disappointed in the service more than anything. They called me ahead of time to say that the brunch menu would be $30 "prefix, " which was fine. It included four courses and a brunch cocktail.

Our first course (fresh fruit with walnut bread) came after we asked for it after our 2nd course (beet salad with goat cheese and lemon vinaigrette and a ravioli that was lovely and had a poached egg in the middle with a butter sauce and asparagus) had already arrived. (the server blamed the busser for not delivering it) The 2nd course was really lovely and I had forgotten about the first for quite some time. The third course came (eggs benedict with smoked salmon and creme brulee french toast), my mother asked for silverware and received them, and I sat dumbfounded wondering if I should use my hands just for the effect, since I also lacked silverware. During our third course, mother found an egg shell the size of a quarter in her meal. Luckily she found it in time so that it wasn't ingested, but she ate everything else on the plate! It was delectable!

Before receiving our 3rd course, we both requested coffee with cream and sugar. These came, but the cream was missing until after our third course had already arrived and then the server checked up on us. The restaurant was SLOW from my vantage point, and it seemed like the server was just plain LAZY. It is very easy to ask whether a guest would like cream and/or sugar with their coffee when taking the order, and bringing them all at the same time. Finally mother suggested that he bring cream to go with the coffee, which was already luke-warm.

By this time I had lost my appetite and we both thought it was a good idea to get dessert to-go. I also might add that I did speak to the bar manager about our meal, not sighting our service miss-haps, but precisely speaking of the shells in mother's meal. The manager was pleasant and asked if there was anything she could do, but at that point there was none anyway. I said the meal was "ok" but to this she did not respond as if apologetic and yearning to make the best of a bad situation. Instead, it was acceptable that an OK meal was OK by the management.

Mom and I retreated to the Rodin museum and enjoyed the rare sculpture that not many outside of France get to see. I especially enjoyed the Youth Triumphant , and mom liked a more life-like statue of The Burghers of Calais

It really was a lovely windy day in Philadelphia, and I was pleased to share it with my Mom, despite the problems we had at London Grill. From what my friends tell me back home, it was an anomaly, and their sangrias are quite good.

[DonRocks]

[These paragraphs were copied from The Mother Thread as part of larger posts.

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Khyber Pass Pub (2nd Street) - Saturday morning and not much open for brunch in the Society Hill neighborhood. We stumbled across Khyber Pass Pub...open...brunch...bloody mary's. Done. If grungy basement pubs with killer beer lists are your thing, this place is a must. Food wasn't bad either. Despite the name (it was formerly a Pakistani joint) Khyber serves New Orleans inspired food - po-boys, gumbos etc. etc. Beignets were fine. Boudin with eggs, hashbrowns, and toast was exactly what I was looking for to help cure a hangover. Don't expect high cuisine here, but the next time I'm hungover in Philly and within stumbling distance of the Khyber, I'm there. Veg/Vegan friendly. Brunch starts at 11am Sat & Sun.

Toast (Spruce Street) - Again not much open at 10am on a Sunday. Toast is a hipster-ish cafe brunch lunch spot. Open early (8am sat & sun!). Menu is primarily different variations on toasted bread products with eggs and salads. If you are nearby, need an early morning spot or something on the lighter side, not a bad spot to know about. Toasted english muffin, two poached eggs, smoked salmon, asparagus, with a side salad for $10.50. Good bacon. Service was sloooooow.

Brunch another day at another Starr joint, Route 6, was equally successful - very good eggs (including a perfectly prepared french style omelette) and pancakes, but seafood was the way to go here. Perfectly fried whole bellied clams, a delightful fried fish sandwich, and some lovely oysters and clams from the raw bar.

LaCroix's ridiculous buffet brunch - now at $65 and probably still worth it. The food were delicious and most were nicely portioned for two or three gentle bites. Tips for future visits - don't fall for the "discounted" $25 valet parking deal. We found a $5 (all day weekend and after 5 PM) garage about 10 minutes away and found the walk back to be very helpful for digestion. They also keep a lot of tables off of OpenTable, so call to book if no tables are available on OpenTable.

- Brunch/Lunch - Kanella - This is one of our favorites and we keep coming back. I would kill for a restaurant like this in DC. Amazing, fresh, delicious Cretian, jewish-influenced food. I had a wonderful house made merguez with eggs and yogurt. Wonderfully flavored and spicy. My wife had shakshouka which was great. We also had a soup called trahana which I had never had before. It was truly outstanding, one of the better things I have eaten this year. The soup is basically wheat, veges and yogurt that is mixed, fermented and dried. It was then reconstituted with a bit of milk and other stuff. Great, delicious soup.

Also had some other good stuff at the Reading Market and a nice brunch at Serafina, which had really good freshly squeezed juices. Will do a more lengthy post later. I wanted to go to some different places, but we were going with friends who drooled over my blog from my last trip to Philly so we did a good amount of repeating, but at least they were still good choices!

Saturday Brunch- After visiting a couple friends moving into the area we went to Pub and Kitchen, a former haunt in the graduate hospital area that occupies the small niche of gastropubs that actually bring the thunder with more than decor. The Welsh Rarebit was a strange starter, it confused my taste buds into thinking I was eating peanut butter at times. The girl's burger with mushroom duxelle was very tasty and cooked exactly to temperature, if served slightly cool. My smoked trout omelette was very fluffy (see recent DR thread treating the difficulty of making the perfect omelette at home). I wish the fried scallop potatoes came with something other than a bottle of Heinz for dressing though. I also could have used a screen on the straw of my wrangler drink (fancy bloody mary with tons of shaved horseradish). The honey whiskey wings here are awesome, the wine list is thoughtful, but the beer list is disappointing. Done.

Sunday Brunch- New Wave Cafe in Queen Village. Not an ambitious place but a solid neighborhood joint. Their menu is inconsistent in hell--in presentation and in taste--but my chicken italiano sandwich really hit the spot. After some coffee at the Java Company we hit the road.

Brunch at Sabrina's (2 locations) was lovely. Huge servings, creative, interesting spins on the classics. Call ahead to put your name on the list to reduce wait times or get up and go early, as they open at 8.

For brunch honey's is a good spot but Sabrina's is fantastic and a shorter cab ride.

It's old news by now, but erin o'shea is leaving marigold kitchen to open a texas barbecue restaurant on south street in the fall and the restaurant is temporarily closing at the end of this month to give a new chef time to get established. In hindsight, we should have eaten dinner here and brunch at fork. I allowed one hour to walk to this university city destination from around 11th and market, and had underestimated the distance by a good 10 minutes and probably not taken the most direct route since my map ran out only blocks beyond the Schuylkill River so that we were arriving late, breathless and sweaty for our 10:00 reservation (which, as it turns out, we didn't need). By the time we reached the 500 block of south 45th street, we were walking so fast, in such a hurry, that we passed right by the place and stopped two blocks beyond, where my wife insisted we were lost and tried to hail a cab and I decided to ask the first person on the street if she knew the whereabouts of larchwood avenue, the cross street we were looking for. Not only did she know, but she was also heading to the same place, and she turned out to be our server. Along the short distance back from where we had come, to the restaurant, which is hidden away in a house that she said even some of the neighbors don't know about, we got to talking about fork, and she said that she had been there a few times and always ended up feeling disappointed. The small meal that followed was bliss, just the pick-me-up I needed when I was starting to feel I had become entirely jaded and unable to recognize good cooking. I had been blaming myself for the experience the night before. we shouldn't have eaten so close before dinner, which was a wallop of a breakfast at the dutch eating place in the reading terminal market of the eggiest apple and cinnamon French toast imaginable, sopping in butter, sitting by thick slices of turkey bacon. If I had come to fork famished, I would have loved it. I would have licked its plates. (and there is some truth to this: one of the most gratifying meals I have had in my entire life was at a gloppy Eskimo Chinese restaurant beyond Whitehorse after subsisting for a week along the dempster highway on pudding pops, apple sauce and caribou jerky.) it doesn't sound like much, but marigold kitchen's maple glazed hot smoked salmon with poached egg and potato roti was well worth the hike, simply perfect any way you look at it. silken in texture, anointed with egg and rounded out with the potato cake, this was some of the best fish ever, so plain and so easy it seemed, yet quietly exalted, accompanied by a small mound of lightly dressed arugula, beet greens, baby lettuce and lemony purslane. I've been running into a lot of places these days that want to cook this way, but few have the ability to carry it off. Here, at least for several more days, they do it assuredly and with a whisper.

Had a lovely brunch at the White Dog Cafe (on Sansom between 34th and 36th sts.) with my mom today. We both chose the Eggs St. Bernard, two eggs poached on english muffin with smoked salmon and hollandaise sauce (there is something really special about this sauce cuz it was better than average) and green beans. This dish was absolutely amazing. I was concerned the salt content would have been too much, but my first bite alleviated these fears. Mom and I were delighted. The White Dog serves fresh squeezed OJ, and the coffee was freshly brewed and just what we needed.

Looking forward to my next meal in the city two weeks from today. Spending Mother's Day at the London Grill on Fairmount Ave. I need to get home more often!

For brunch this morning we were going to go to Honey's Sit 'n Eat, but the line outside was daunting. We headed over to Market for a quick bite at Fork etc, but ended up at Continental on the corner of market & 1st. Great brunch - my friend had a huge plate of brioche french toast with caramelized banana and I had the roasted tomato frittata with fontina & bacon served with a side of grits & multi-grain toast. They start you off with a passion fruit slushie too!

Sunday brunch was at Creperie Beau Monde--yum!!! The French onion soup was warm and comforting, and it had the perfect amount of cheese on top. The savory mushroom crepe was very good, but it was the Nutella and banana dessert crepe that really won the day. Delicious! The atmosphere was neat, too--it almost felt like we were in a little creperie in Paris.

I am a brunch person, so the menu at Sabrina's was immediately tempting. I ended up with the french toast -- huge pieces of Challah bread stuffed with cream cheese and bananas and probably something else -- that was incredibly good, and impossible to finish. The restaurant is one of those tiny little places where you wait outside for 45 minutes until you can squeeze into a table and read the specials off the blackboard walls (similar to the type of places I used to haunt in Boston, but haven't found yet in DC -- Colorado Kitchen comes closest, I'd guess).

Brunch at White Dog was excellent, especially the pumpkin cream cheese pancakes with almond and walnut syrup. And Amada was a home run, with cheeses and meats and fried apple and all sorts of greatness. $80 before tip but we agreed we could have gotten by with maybe 6 dishes instead of 9, so it could be done for less.

another place that i go to every time i'm in philly on a sunday, is beau monde. it's a creperia on 6th and bainbridge. they serve a brunch menu (i get the mushroom, roquefort cheese, sunny side up egg crepe almost every time) and have great spicy bloody marys!