Not-Switzerland

This weekend had me hauling the culinary passport to the northeast.  Ok it was North Carolina, the eastern part, but still northeast of Rock Hill.  The occasion was a family celebration with great home cooking and would have been worthy of a blog entry on its own but I forgot to get pictures of the food ’cause I was busy eating it.

After that great lunch I didn’t want to settle for some old fast food biscuit for breakfast on the way out of town.  I was in New Bern (named by the Swiss settlers for the Swiss capital and there’s a bear on the city symbol so there’s your connection with the title) and their downtown has a number of little restaurants and a few serve breakfast.  I chose Baker’s Kitchen on Middle St and I’m happy I did.

The restaurant is in an old storefront and they kept some of the brickwork exposed as you can see below around the second story windows and wall.  The cozy little corner they put me in was warm and homey as you can see from the shot over my shoulder in the second picture.

They had a lot of standard breakfast fare but I found something you don’t find everywhere.  It was called Eggs in a Frame.  In the photo you can see they cut a hole in the bread and cook the egg in the cavity.  This I’ve seen before but these folks take the cutouts and make French toast from them.  I opted for sausage & their Dutch Potatoes for my meat and other starch.

The egg / toast combo was good but it needed a bit more salt & pepper to suit me.  The Dutch potatoes turned out to be essentially hash brown casserole and unlike some places I’ve been where the casserole was obviously frozen and reheated this was hot and tasted fresh.  The sausage links were nice size links not those wee little brown and serve jobs.  They had a decent amount of sage and enough pepper to let you know it was there without making you sweat.  The French toast cutouts were sprinkled with cinnamon and powdered sugar and came with a little tub of a melted butterlike substance to dunk or drown them in should you choose to.  I didn’t.

Overall it was a happy way to start the drive home and if you live in the area or are passing through I’d recommend giving them a try.