“Breakfast” means “America”

This post will repeat things I wrote in an earlier post, but that’s okay, because I want it to stand on its own.

I just had my first decent breakfast in weeks. I had my last good breakfast in Ireland, during my recent trip. Every breakfast since then was lame. Until today. I just visited McDonald’s.

I don’t know why people don’t man up and admit McDonald’s makes some of the best breakfast food on the planet. It must be snob anxiety. They’re afraid of what other people will think. I remember seeing Candice Bergen brag that she had never had a McDonald’s hamburger. She sounded like a fool to me. Sure, she said the right thing to avoid raising the anemic eyebrows of her elitist vegan peers, but she sounded like a snob who was more interested in currying favor than in enjoying good food. For all she knew, McDonald’s burgers were wonderful, but she was afraid to try them because the unwashed intracoastal masses ate them.

I know Mcdonald’s burgers are NOT wonderful, but then I’ve eaten them. I gave them a shot. I didn’t sneer at them in proud ignorance.

Today I had a sausage and egg McMuffin, a sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit, and hash browns. I mixed Hunt’s All-Natural ketchup with a little Frank’s Red Hot, and I dipped liberally. I’m still basking in the afterglow.

You may wonder what I had in Ireland that constituted my last good breakfast. Simple. I went to the McDonald’s on Dublin’s O’Connell Street.

I think the first breakfast Rhodah and I shared in Dublin came from Keogh’s, a cafe in the Temple Bar area. They sold us two scones; cranberry and raisin. We paid over three Euros each. The scones were cold and dry. The butter was cold and hard. Rhodah’s scone had no raisins in it. We sent it back. The waiter returned our serve, unaltered. They had a big pile of scones with raisins in them, but they insisted a raisinless raisin scone was normal.

Not long after that, we went to Bread 41, a hipster bakery that sells the kind of food people describe as “artisanal,” which means it looks good. Bread 41 had a lot of great Internet reviews, and people on a forum recommended it.

Here is the problem with food: most people have the palates of goats. If you put three people at a table, you serve them horse manure on cold bagels, and you pay two of them to say the bagels are great, the third will almost certainly agree. The third person is not likely to know the difference between horse manure and good food, and even if he does, he’ll probably want to fit in with the other two. For these reasons, it’s not really possible to get good advice from people you don’t know. When it comes to the Internet, the problem is compounded by fake reviews. All over the world, people are making good money recommending things they haven’t tried.

We were told Bread 41 was so good, we needed a reservation. We were told people lined up around the block. We walked in anyway, during peak breakfast hours, and there were about three people in front of us. That should have told me something.

I ordered pain au chocolat (“chocolate croissant”), a croissant, and hot chocolate. Rhodah ordered something called a morning bun, along with a roll that had been sliced in half and filled with some kind of cream. She also ordered coffee.

The food looked marvelous. The croissants (I will call both of them that) had all sorts of flaky layers in them. The items Rhodah ordered were very appetizing. Then we tried to eat our purchases.

The croissant tasted like burnt egg wash and not much more. A true croissant is made with milk, sugar, and salt. It should be very flavorful. It should not be dry. It should not be harsh. My croissant had very little flavor, except for tasting burned.

I have managed to enjoy a lot of bad croissants. Burger King croissants are not impressive, but they taste like bread and butter, so they’re pleasant to eat. Publix croissants have a nice buttery taste. Walmart croissants are no worse than a good slice of bagged white bread. In Egypt, at a hotel buffet, I had croissants which pretty clearly arrived at the kitchen in a bag, but they weren’t offensive. Bread 41’s croissants, I could not finish. I mean, I could have, but I didn’t want to. They were that bad.

The chocolate one was just like the other one, but it had chocolate filling installed WAYYYY down in one end. This made it look very stylish, but it was a stupid move, because you would have to eat most of the croissant before tasting chocolate.

Rhodah’s morning bun was fine. It was sort of a glorified pecan twirl kind of a thing. Spiced dough rammed into a mold and baked. Imagine a really good cinnamon roll, and then imagine it dryer and with less flavor. She shared it with me, and it was the only thing we finished.

The cream roll was horrendous. Rhodah complained about the flavor. I tried it, and it had a bitter taste. There was a spice in it that belonged in something like sausage or Indian food. Ruined the whole thing.

Her coffee was lukewarm and not very tasty. My hot chocolate was fraudulent in that it was not hot at all. It was tepid, and it tasted as though it had been made with spoiled milk and water. It wasn’t very sweet, either.

I think the Irish dislike hot beverages. This wasn’t the only time we were served lukewarm coffee or cocoa.

I was afraid the chocolate was spoiled, so I barely touched it. I didn’t want to spend my vacation throwing up.

This is how post-Food Network foodie hipster food is. It’s supposed to look perfect, and you’re supposed to rave about it even if it tastes bad, which it often does.

I wrote an honest Internet review, and someone from Bread 41 had a conniption and responded with a total lack of professionalism. This says a lot about the restaurant. A professional never berates a diner. They say they’re sorry the diner didn’t like the experience. They say they will try to do better. Or they ignore the complaint altogether, sure that it’s a fluke. When you go after a dissatisfied patron, you show that you can’t improve because constructive criticism infuriates you.

I’ll go through the employee’s claims.

He said the bitter roll was a Swedish semla. I’m sure you’re all very familiar with these, since all Americans eat them several times a week. He said it contained cardamom, as specified in the traditional recipe. He seemed irate that I did not expect this.

Couple of things. Like 98% of the world’s population, I had never heard of semlas. If you’re going to sell people bitter cream rolls for breakfast, you should offer some kind of warning before handing them over, unless your business is in Sweden. On top of that, I tend to doubt the amount of cardamom was correct, because the roll was disgusting. It tasted medicated. Based on the chef’s inability to recognize a good croissant, which people in nearly every country on Earth can do, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he has no idea how much cardamom to put in a semla.

You don’t have to tell people what croissants are like before you sell them, because everyone knows what a croissant is. If you’re going to sell, say, an obscure Congolese pastry made with a tablespoon of mace, you should let customers know what they’re in for.

My wild guess is that he overdid the cardamom. The web says a proper semla is “lightly flavored” with it.

He also made it clear he thought I had no idea what croissants should be like, because I was American. He said American croissants were full of various unpleasant things, such as emulsifiers.

That was really dumb. America has the best food on Earth, because America is rich and able to pay for it. We have drawn all sorts of skilled immigrants over the centuries, and many of them are from France, the home of croissants. I know Ireland is the world’s French pastry mecca, so forgive me, but I think our French cooks, and the people who have learned from them, have figured out how to make croissants here.

When I say we have the best food on Earth, which is true, I don’t mean the majority of our restaurants sell great food. I mean our best restaurants, bakeries, butchers, and grocers are as good as anyone’s. Now that the microbrew revolution has blossomed, we also make the world’s best beer; no contest, even from the Belgians.

Obviously, our croissants are not all full of chemicals. I’m sure some are, but clearly, this country is full of bakers who would never use such things. And the unpopular truth is that sometimes, chemicals make good food a lot better. Try adding sodium citrate to mac and cheese.

He said I should continue eating at places like Burger King and Walmart, since their food was more on a par with my tastes. He was actually right, because a lot of the food from these places, unlike his food, isn’t so off-putting I don’t want to finish it. A good Whopper is better than a burnt croissant.

Go to Youtube and search for croissants made in Paris. You’ll see they’re not burnt. They’re not even dark.

I can’t believe an Irish person would dare make fun of another country’s food. Irish food has such a bad reputation, the government mounted a nationwide campaign to fix it, and it hasn’t been a great success. They don’t even do uniformly good work with fish and chips, which is a signature dish of the British Isles. Imagine going to Tennessee and finding that most barbecue restaurants were no good. Same idea. It could never happen. It’s nice that the Irish have made an effort, but I ate there for about 12 days, and I was usually disappointed, even in the Guinness, which they served incorrectly.

We never had a bad Thai or Italian meal in Ireland, but the Irish themselves nearly always let us down.

Two hungry people showed up at Bread 41, hoping to fuel themselves for a long day of walking, they were hungry enough to eat substandard food if necessary, and they left most of their items unfinished. The customers were not the problem. Case closed.

I really wanted to get some calories into me because I knew we would use them up, but it wasn’t worth it to me to finish my food, nor was it worth it to Rhodah. When we left, we joked about needing to find a place to have breakfast.

After this, we had breakfast at two B&B’s. One was in Dingle, and the other was in Inis Mor. In both places, I made the error of ordering the full Irish breakfast.

They gave me one egg, which is ridiculous, dry Irish bacon, fried mushrooms, white pudding (funky-tasting sausage), link sausage, and canned beans which were about like pork and beans. I also had toast. I passed on the black pudding, which is a giant scab of seasoned congealed blood.

I don’t know why people rave about English and Irish breakfasts, because they’re not very good. They’re kind of okay. That’s about it. Who pours beans out of can and microwaves them for breakfast? Who eats one egg? The link sausage was like finely ground mystery meat; it tasted cheap.

My advice is this: don’t try to like the full English or Irish breakfast. You may think you’re supposed to like it, because people who don’t know good food claim it’s good, but it’s not good at all.

I also had eggs Benedict; an AMERICAN dish. I couldn’t tell exactly what the object that was supposed to be an English muffin was, but it was dry, small, and hard. The egg was also small, which is weird, because Americans supposedly use smaller eggs than the British, who are right next door to the Irish. All the Irish eggs I saw were tiny.

In America, eggs Benedict is wonderful. You get two big eggs with lots of Hollandaise sauce. You get a big English muffin with butter. You get Canadian bacon, which is much better than Irish bacon, a drier, less tasty version of the same thing.

Eggs Benedict came out of Delmonico’s restaurant in New York, where it was named after a customer named Benedict. If it had tasted like Irish eggs Benedict, no one would know what it is today, because no one would have considered saving the recipe or naming it.

Here’s something else that’s bad about Irish breakfasts: they don’t provide cream for coffee. They use milk, which is completely useless. The fat in cream kills bitterness and improves the texture of coffee. How can people in other nations have failed to catch on?

I could have had French toast, but I opted not to. Why? Because I knew there was no way they would have real syrup. Maple syrup is a NORTH AMERICAN condiment. It would amaze me to learn it was sold anywhere in Europe. Ordinary pancake syrup is a chemical counterfeit better known as diluted corn syrup. I don’t understand why any serious establishment would serve pancakes, waffles, or French toast without offering real syrup.

In Dublin, we found a McDonald’s, and Rhodah loved it. The McMuffins were very good. The hash browns were a bit undercooked, but they were still better than Irish food.

The food I had this morning was great, and McDonald’s deserves some credit. They make beautiful biscuits; if you don’t believe me, order them a la carte, take them home, and put your own gravy on them. Their muffins can’t be criticized. They’re standard English muffins, smeared with real butter. Their sausage is just as good, or better than, anything you can get at your local grocery store. They fry their circular eggs in-house. Granted, the folded eggs are warmed up at their restaurants, but eggs take reheating very well. Waffle House cooks eggs to order, but McDonald’s makes a much better breakfast.

If you don’t respect the hash browns, try making them yourself. I have. You will fail. It’s very difficult to make a McDonald’s-style hash brown that isn’t soggy or brown inside. They do a beautiful job.

The coffee at McDonald’s is also excellent, WHEN they keep it fresh. They tend to let the decaf sit, and then it starts to smell like cat pee. I really mean cat pee. Not trying to be funny.

I am extremely blunt and honest when I write Internet reviews. Business owners seem to think the purpose of reviews is to flatter them and lure people to their establishments. It’s not. It’s to give people solid information so they can patronize good businesses and avoid bad ones. If a proprietor does a bad job, I’ll say so, and I don’t care at all how he feels or whether it costs him money. I’m not on his side. I’m on the side of other consumer. If he doesn’t like complaints, he should change his ways.

If the Bread 41 guy is upset, tough. Reviews are matters of business. We’re not buddies. If he thinks people who do business with him are supposed to go on the web and lick his ear, he needs to grow up.

The best breakfasts I’ve had in Europe were continental, i.e. a couple of baked items and coffee or chocolate. On the continent, you get excellent pastries and rolls, and the coffee and chocolate are just as good. When it comes to real breakfast, meaning a meal, I don’t know of any country that can touch America. If you have a Cracker Barrel and a McDonald’s near you, you are in pretty thin air, and there are many American restaurants that put these businesses to shame. Try a real Jewish deli that serves good bagels and smoked fish. Try a fancy hotel with a big brunch spread. I make country ham, scrambled eggs, biscuits and gravy, and fried apples that would bring most people to their knees. Americans do breakfast right. No getting around it.