My boyfriend and I were looking for a great breakfast spot to try in his area. Bethlehem really has no shortage of amazing restaurants, but the menu at this place stood out to us particularly. We arrived here and thankfully were able to park for free because it is a holiday weekend. This restaurant, or its current pop-up location to be precise, is located on busy Main Street lined with a great diversity of other shops and restaurants.
We ordered the breakfast mac and cheese with an over easy egg on top, which comes with potatoes, macaroni, bacon, and maple sausage. We also ordered the French toast crossaint with bourbon bananas. Unfortunately, we were told that they did not have any of the bourbon bananas. We settled for a mix of the berry compote and the triple chocolate topping, which is what we were offered in place of the bananas.
The food took quite a long time to arrive, despite the restaurant not being all that busy. After waiting what seemed like a half hour, we finally got to try the food. My first impression of the crossaint French toast was that it was delicious. As I began to tear into it more and more, I realized that the berry compote was kind of bitter, and it was really good that it was mixed with chocolate, because on its own it would have been too much to handle. Overall, though, this dish was the better of the two we tried, and it made me wonder why more people do not make French toast out of crossaints.
The breakfast mac and cheese was flawed in a few ways that would have been exceedingly easy to fix with a little foresight from the chef. For example, the dish includes a "potato bottom", but the potatoes were not seasoned at ALL. Just bland, bare potatoes at the bottom of the dish. There really isn't an excuse for that. Even a little bit of black pepper would have made this dish ten times better.
I attributed this problem to perhaps the chef thinking that the salty sausage, bacon, and cheese would have carried the dish completely in terms of flavor. But, how wrong that is! There was not a single fleck of black pepper on the dish at all. So, we added hot sauce to the dish and it was immediately so much better. Still, some pepper, sautéed onion and/or garlic (or even onion and garlic powder), and other basic seasonings would have made the dish absolutely phenomenal.
I would probably come back to try the peasant omelette, which includes lobster meat in it. That was the one other dish on the menu that I really wanted to try this morning, but I knew that my boyfriend and I would not have been able to finish it all if we bought it. However, there's really no excuse for this restaurant to not know how to season their food. It does make me a little nervous to try their other savory dishes in the event that those are also unseasoned. read more