Tag Archives: North America

Breakfast in Bern

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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.

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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.

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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.

Oh! Canada

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Canada

Canadian stamp

That’s right it’s a country, they have food.  What they don’t really have is Canadian restaurants.  As I was lamenting the fact that North America is sadly underrepresented on the blog and since I’d done Mexico already it wasn’t going to get much better.  Then it hit me, find some place that serves poutine.  That’s Canadian so it’d do.  A quick search turned up 3 possibilities and two of them looked like hipster gastropubs so I decided the Friendly Moose in Matthews, NC was the place to go.

From the outside it looks like a good sized brick house that has been converted to a restaurant / bar and inside kind of continues that look with several rooms with seating.  I sat in the front room since it had a big window and a stunning view of the parking lot.  The moose theme is embraced and there is one in the foyer (see below) as well as a fake stuffed moose head in the front room and a couple of wooden ones outside.  When I got the menu I discovered they do breakfast until 2pm on weekends and was sort of bummed out until I saw they considered poutine a potential breakfast food plus they had a loaded breakfast version which is what I went with.

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I’ve never had poutine before but I knew in general what it was but for those who don’t, standard poutine is French fries and cheese curd covered in brown gravy.  The Friendly Moose breakfast poutine offers options of types of potatoes and gravy.  Poutine purists will likely be scandalized but you can get it with fries, hashbrowns or tater tots and your gravy options are white sausage gravy or standard brown beef gravy.  I kept it standard and went with fries and brown gravy but the loaded breakfast poutine came with 2 eggs, a biscuit and one of several meat options.  I was hoping they had Canadian bacon but no such luck.  Sausage it was then.  They don’t use cheese curd but use a shredded white cheese that was stringy but didn’t seem to be mozzarella.  Whatever it was it tasted ok but was very break resistant in it’s stringiness.

As breakfasts go this was decent and filling.  If I visit the Moose again I will likely go with tots over fries and if I’m going off the rails I might as well try the sausage gravy too.

If I lived in Matthews I could see making this a regular place as it does have the Friendly feel.  The only issue I saw was the apparent preciousness of butter.  I heard two people have to ask for some before my food arrived so I was on alert and when there was none immediately asked for it.  I got it after asking a second time and I was well on my way to being done.  In the grand scheme of things that’s a pretty minor deal.

And for the record while there were plenty of meese, I didn’t see any sign of a Captain or a flying squirrel. Here’s the web link, The Friendly Moose and don’t forget to check out the Tell Me More page for a poutine recipe and the #1 Canadian song ever according to the CBC.