home cooking

The brothers’ breakfast café on sundays is our church. We call it the brothers because three brothers own and run it, they’re there everyday, smiling, rain, or snow. We’ve run all over this town looking for the perfect breakfast and there are many good places, but we always return to the brothers. julie says they have the best coffee, but its something else we’ve decided. On one hand you can say its only bacon and eggs, and toast, anybody ought to be able to do a decent job, but after so many meals around town we’ve come up with our own litmus test, the food must not only fill up your body, it must fill up your soul and it must keep you full for hours. The brothers fulfills this most basic test. We don’t know how it works but it does. The service is spotty but cheerful, and the place gets crowded, long lines, hustle and bustle, your order can get lost in the endless flow of eggs, bacon, toast, rolls, home fries and you can end up waiting forty minutes and may have to go back and ask where’s my food, once or twice, but ultimately your order will come and you may get a brothers surprise, 4 eggs instead of 2, and a pile of crisp bacon that must have been cooked for the whole table and the kind of coffee so good you can’t make it yourself that good no matter how hard you try. How does this happen? We don’t know, but we ask ourselves this question over and over after we get tired of the place and try another, but guilty we always come back. I call it the proletariat mess hall, the people mobbing in like russian emigres , a wild looking crowd , long hair, mismatched patchwork clothing, beards, rough hands, bad makeup, wools caps poking at the ceiling and an almost feral milling around, everyone jostling for tables, our orders. The walls are a bright yellow, housing lots of local art. Some sundays this guy shows up and plays 10 notes on a trumpet and announces, lets have a hand for the cooks and we all laugh and clap... . We’ve decided its as much about the atmosphere as much as the food, something happens in there, we come out feeling all warm and homey, its as if you’ve been eating in your moms kitchen,and we all know mom didn’t always make the perfect meals, but it was home, and maybe that’s what they’ve captured there, not just the feeling of home..it is home, its their home and our home and they love it and do the best they can, as mom did and those of us who eat there know this and we overlook our orders being late, because just like home we know its all about love. And the coffee julie says. Jgk