After four years of celebrating foods meant to be eaten after the morning is over — pizza, burgers, tacos and ribs — CL's annual food tournament is finally giving proper due to the meal that kicks off the day. Get ready for the Breakfast Bowl.
It's the most important meal of the day, if you believe 1950s nutritionists or your mom. But most people give it short shrift at best — protein bar and a Big Gulp for some, instant oatmeal and pasteurized OJ for others. Some skip solid food entirely in favor of the Starbucks drive-through. Caffeine, my friends, is not — technically — food.
Don't you know that some of your friends get up before dawn to prepare the kinds of breakfasts that can really start the day off right? Eggs — nature's perfect food — in dozens of different ways, from simple sunny-side up to poached perfection, from hard scramble to fluffy French omelet. Sausage, in crisp-skinned links or grease-slicked patties. Bacon — oh, the bacon.
And let's not forget that breakfast is the one meal of the day where sweet stuff can be the entree, instead of merely an award for cleaning your plate. A tower of Belgian waffles covered in fresh strawberries and whipped cream isn't a dessert at 8 a.m.; it's the main attraction. Stacks of flapjacks topped by a slowly spreading pat of butter and doused in maple syrup, or French toast redolent of cinnamon and nutmeg — it's all allowed before 10 a.m..
Breakfast can come on a huge platter laden with cholesterol and saturated fats, in a tidy handheld pastry or sandwich, or in artery-clearing bowls of whole grains laced with healthy fruit. More than any food CL has entered into competitions in the past, breakfast has variety.
It's not as easy to pit a burrito prenado from the Taco Bus against some suggestive fried eggs at Skyway Jack's, or the delectable baked goods of Pane Rustica against Oystercatchers' decadent buffet, as it is a slice of pizza from two different neighborhood joints. But it can be done, and we're counting on you to do it.
With your help we picked 64 of the best breakfast places in the Bay area, from low-end short-order egg spots to luxury hotel buffets. (We avoided chains — sorry, Denny's and First Watch fans. And yes, we've already been told that the lack of bagel places is a sad omission. Maybe next year?) Starting today — Thurs., March 10 — we will pit them against each other, manna à manna, in a massive struggle to crown the best breakfast around the Bay.
We'll give you five days to vote in the first round online at cltampa.com/breakfastbowl. You'll cut the field from 64 competitors to the Toasty 32, with voting ending at 5 p.m. on Mon., March 14. Starting at 9 a.m. the next morning, you'll have a solid week to dismiss another half of the competitors, resulting in the Sizzling 16 when second round voting ends at 5 p.m. on March 21. Then we cut to the Eggscellent 8 (voting ends 5 p.m. March 24) and the Final Flippin' 4 (voting ends 5 p.m. March 28).
That's when I get to weigh in. Accompanied by a crack team of breakfast mavens, I'll taste the wares of the Final Flippin' 4 breakfast spots, narrow the field to two, and announce the winner — the Breakfast of Champions, as it were — in the issue of April 7.
Don't think of your own research as a thankless task; think of it as an opportunity to return to days gone by, when mom, dad and kids sat around a table loaded with tasty treats, eating their fill to sustain them through the long day ahead. Prime your pumps with a bowl of cornflakes, just to remind your body of what it feels like to start the morning with needed sustenance, then head out to the Breakfast Bowl competitors and see what they bring to the table.
You just might find that the most important meal of the day returns to its rightful place as a necessity, instead of a luxury. Eat well. Vote often.
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2011.