Breakfast at Madison Restaurant

For breakfast this morning we moved advanced down the diner canvassing list for our neighborhood and chose Madison Restaurant. Madison offers a the typical extensive New York diner menu that makes you wonder how one kitchen can possibly churn out so many different choices and varieties of cuisine. It's certainly good to know that if ever I have my heart set on fajitas and I'm meeting friends who crave bulgogi and lasagna, there will be options available to meet that need. One would think that overall quality would suffer from this lack of focus, but I say it's a small price to pay for such flexibility.

On the general topic of breakfast/brunch on Sundays, one thing we have noticed here is that while this may be the city that never sleeps, it certainly doesn't like to get up early and make brunch. From what we have seen so far, brunch hours typically start at 11:00 or even 12:00. Before that, you get a more limited breakfast menu. If you are an early riser on Sundays (and be early I mean 9:00), you have a bit of a wait before brunch. In my book, serving a meal starting at 11:00 and later makes it lunch, and maybe even dinner seeing as how it is often served late into the afternoon.

At Madison, they offer brunch starting at 10:00. Breakfast starts at 6:00. We were there shortly before 9:00, so we were limited to the breakfast menu. It didn't appear that there was much more available for brunch (besides different combination pricing), but still it would have been nice to have brunch start earlier.

The fresh-squeezed fruit juices (orange, grapefruit) were unusually frothy. They must have been juicing to order, or else I don't know how they would get that consistency. It was pretty good, if not quite cold enough.

I tried a feta and mushroom omelet, which was pretty good. My wife had comforting eggs and corned beef hash, which got a thumbs up despite a complaint that hashbrowns were served on the side. We enjoyed a lively discussion about whether or not the potato content of the hash made the hashbrown side redundant, and in the end agreed to disagree. Little J enjoyed the Waffle with bacon, but he maintained that the waffles at nearby Moonstruck Diner were better.