A Rare Find in South America - A Breath of Fresh Normality.
Back to the basics...
Breakfast on the run like in the USA - that is a change I can live with!
I have covered everything from turkeys to pepperoni pizzas over the years. Living down south in Argentina, you tend to miss some of the foods from your home country at times. So it's a breath of fresh air if someone from this country opens a restaurant that serves something similar to what you grew up with.
When I was 13, I worked at a Greek restaurant and I would bus tables on Saturdays and Sundays for $2 an hour. Yes, I know I'm dating myself! When I came here, I brought some of those recipes with me in my head. I cook a really tasty cream of chicken soup, killer hamburgers with olives and American cheese on them. I am also pretty good with breakfast as well.
Sometimes you don't want to cook
The other day my youngest mentioned a breakfast restaurant that serves bacon, eggs and hash browns, which is not a common breakfast food here. He mentioned it in passing and I said, "Wait a minute! Are you saying that you know a place that serves American breakfast?" He confirm that he knows one and it is not far from our house.
US license plates and sports team decor
From that point on, I was on a mission. Within one hour, we were walking around in circles looking for the place to which my youngest was leading us. He vaguely knew the location. We ended up finding it and went in for breakfast.
It's a little hole in the wall place that fills up pretty fast on the weekends. When I was younger, in high school, I used to get up a little bit early everyday and stop at the same Greek restaurant, the one I had worked at when I was 13 years old. I always had bacon and eggs with rye toast and coffee. My neighbor's mother went there every day with her kids. After breakfast, I would go to school.
I was hoping the same kind of thing would be possible here, less the the neighbor and school. This place could fit the bill.
The menu shows different breakfasts as if there were one that fits a certain city or neighborhood in New York. I am not sure if that is the way things work in NY, but I know they like to name the pizza here depending on what ingredients the pizza has on it. I am assuming they are doing the same with the breakfasts.
This says you can get a coffee that they will keep refilling. This is the first time I have seen free refills on coffee since I've been here. We tried it, but they don't have coffee creamers and sugar right on the table. That is the way it was in the mid-west of the USA where I used to live. Jay's seems to be really trying to get things right. By the time breakfast was over, my kids understood why I drink so much coffee because this is the way coffee is served in all the Denny's and other diners there.
For reference, the dollar/pesos rate is nearly 2000 to 1 meaning the coffee is about $1.25 with refills. Capuccino would be about $2.00 or so.
The bacon and eggs were good. I mean, how can you mess up fried eggs?. They had hash browns which my kids have been eating their entire life when I cook for them. The place got a thumbs down on the hash browns from my boys, but I told them that hash browns in most restaurants are not very good in The States either. They are only good at certain restaurants. They said that mine are the best they've ever had. There is a bias, because they have never had them served in a restaurant.
Since we were already there, I decided to order lunch and take it to go. I wanted to try the BLT, grilled cheese, bagels and "hot wings" but I was too full to eat another meal. We got the rest take out and ate it later in the day.
Everything was awesome aside from the fact that the toast was a little overdone on the Bacon Lettuce and Tomato sandwich. The one thing that was not up to par where the buffalo wings. The wings were very good and the breading they used was awesome, but the sauce was not buffalo wing sauce. It was a hot sauce that is available at most sandwich stores here - all spiciness and no flavor. I love anything spicy. I ended up eating the chicken after adding some actual wing sauce that I have on hand at home. The Bagel was more like bread with seeds but the cream cheese was good. Not authentic but another 10/10 for effort!
The onion rings were the same quality I would get at TGI Friday's and the french fries were excellent! All in all, I have got to give this place an 8 out of a 10 for the mix of food I've tried so far. As far as effort and general ambience, I have to give it a 10 just for the fact that they have opened up an American breakfast place. They have other food for dinner and stuff, but I will be trying the morning foods for some time.
You all have no idea how rare this kind of place is in South America.
It is the second one that has appeared here in all the years I have been here. Of course, I had to write about it. It is in the Recoleta area of the city.
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