Tucked away off my usual beaten track, Nena's has been quietly serving old fashioned, blue collar breakfasts for the past few years to north end Dartmouth and those like myself willing to make a trip there. I'm a shameless fan of breakfast foods, and have an added respect for a place with an all day breakfast, so with Nena's specifically being an all day breakfast joint, they get some extra points.
Stopping by after a night shift to kill time before an early appointment, the small restaurant was empty except for a couple locals having coffee, and the lone staffer on duty. It's nothing fancy - a narrow layout with a counter, semi-open kitchen and walls painted in their yellow motif. It was, however, noticeably cool, which was probably great for the cook, but not so great for everyone else, and I left my coat on the whole time I was there.
The menu is pretty lean, well figuratively anyway, with about 15 breakfast options and half that for lunch items. There's combinations of your various big breakfast items and other typical ones like French toast and pancakes, and Maritimer-favourite fish cakes. Choosing one of the big breakfast-type of meals would have been the best way to see how well they did things here, but their breakfast "poutine" was too tempting. With house-made homefries, bacon, sausage and cheddar covered in hollandaise, and an egg on top, its siren song of gluttony and saturated fats was too much for me to resist. Wanting to try out their house baked beans, I tacked on a side order.
The food came in quick order since I was the only one eating, and what a pile it was. My plate of food looked like eggs Benedict on steroids, with my poached egg and a veritable sea of hollandaise covering a mound of homefries and meat. I cannot over emphasize how much hollandaise there was. I tried to not thick about the sheer volume of it, lest my heart immediately seize up like Wile E Coyote falling after realizing that after several steps that he had run off the edge of a cliff.
I don't have hollandaise nearly enough, so I can't speak to the quality of this one with much expertise. It wasn't gritty so it may no have been a from-mix one, and had a pleasant, lemony tang. It was definitely thinner than I like a hollandaise to be though, and a thick, velvety sauce would have clung to the food much better.
Nena's homefries are on the small side of the Homefries Spectrum, though not as small as the likes of McCain's hashbrowns. The crisp bits of potato stood up nicely to the deluge of hollandaise, although the chopped up bits of bacon and sausage mostly got lost in it, and I felt like their presence was not particularly abundant. That said, everything combined for a fairly tasty hot mess.
I would have ordered some toast to sop up the leftover hollandaise, but a side of toast is a shocking $2 here. That might fly at a downtown location that makes its own bread, but that doesn't jive with this location's overhead costs and the bread they likely use. No thanks.
The bowl of beans, while small, was mighty. I was worried about them initially as their sauce seemed more translucent than the typical tomato- and/or molasses-based sauces, but the worries were forgotten after the first bite. Maple-y and tender, these were some solid beans.
The OJ the have here are the sad bottles of Fairlee.
Nena's is slinging affordable grub that might not be award winning, but sure can hit the spot.
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