Andy HoffmanThe simplicity of breakfast makes it almost impossible to perfect. Eggs, home fries, pancakes, and coffee. Nothing there to challenge even the sleep-deprived, except each item needs a different temperature to come out right. The high heat you need for crispy potatoes will dry out a pancake and harden a yolk. Then again, when a talented chef approaches breakfast the breakfast quickly becomes too complicated: fancy omelet fillings, brandied fruit on the flapjacks, basil-flavored cream sauce on the benedict. And then the best breakfast place bears frequent visits, so the difficult simplicity has to repeat the performance morning after morning, year after year.
For all these reasons, people everywhere hunt out the best breakfast. I had a favorite in San Rafael, CA, but it closed. Another place in Oregon just got too fancy to last. Yet another in Connecticut hit so many highs and lows I just couldn’t recommend it anymore. I can – and I do – recommend Modern Diner in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. They have won loads of Best of contests, including a couple of Food Network awards, but the consistency, decade after decade, distinguishes the place from any other I know.
First, the place itself. The Modern is a classic diner: sleek and chrome bedecked outside, with swirling stools and creak old wooden booths inside. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places, for pete’s sake. And when they decided to expand the original railroad-car to get a new kitchen and accommodate more guests, they built a simple structure reminiscent of a railroad depot. I’m not sure if he was the original owner, but the father of the current owner acquired and ran the place for years, even moving it to its current location, before his son, Nick, took over. I first went there more than 40 years ago and have enjoyed breakfast a few hundred times there. A great breakfast place has to have a rabid local following, with long-term waitstaff who recognize the regulars, but who also treat the novices just as well.
This story gets to the heart of The Modern. Many years ago, not long after Nick took over from his father, a regular came in with a gift. They had been at Disneyworld and found a series of sweatshirts featuring Mickey and Minnie in garb from various eras, standing in front of a gray-screened building of the same period. For the 1930s, Disney posed the mice in front of The Modern Diner. You might know that Disney jealously guards its intellectual property, to the extent that they have sued pediatricians who painted unlicensed Disney characters on their walls. At first pleased by the recognition, Nick and his wife Gina decided that turnabout’s fair play and sued Disney for the unlicensed use of the image of the diner, which the family had owned almost from its creation. Disney realized they had goofed and paid; rumor has it that the company gave the owners a million dollars, and that they then gave half of what they got to the local children’s hospital. Of course, they kept on serving breakfast without missing a day.
I took Deb to the Modern on one of our first dates in Providence. The succulent lemony richness of the benedict’s hollandaise reaches the peak of the art. I can’t resist the cheese grits served with jalapeno bacon, eggs and home fries, made crispy. Sometimes, though not often enough now that we live together in Boston, we get up early and drive an hour to Pawtucket just to indulge in The Modern’s perfect breakfast.