The Recipe Box, Brandon
There are two kinds of breakfasts if you want to view things binarily: Sustenance providing square meal and stomach stuffing gorp fare. One can be exemplified by a plate of bacon and eggs with toast and potatoes…and…grapefruit, I guess. The other features things like cream cheese stuffed french toast, saucy eggs benedict, cheesy sausage and egg casseroles, biscuits and sausage gravy, and chocolate chip pancakes with whipped cream. A week’s worth of calories devoured in one meal with hot lashings of cream and sugared coffee followed by a cinnamon roll the size of your head.
I’m a big fan of both, but for the sake of my health and my wallet and unless it’s my birthday, I tend to opt for the former when breaking the fast away from home.
Often a poor restaurant will try to make up for a lack of quality and care by offering items covered with whipped cream, canned pie filling, chocolate and other sugar-laden fatty ingredients to try and elevate mediocrity by dressing it in dime store tat. But where can you go if you want well made delicious servings of either the simple and healthy or the complex and decadent?
In point of fact, I rarely eat breakfast at home, aside from a banana with my coffee or the previous night’s takeout remains. Going out for breakfast is a treat to ourselves and when I seek it, my breakfast wants are simple: Two eggs over medium, real rye bread toasted crisp and brown with an even spread of butter, thick bacon cooked just crisp on the outside but tender to the bite, and home fries cooked so each slice of potato is browned and crisp with a soft inside and well seasoned. You might not believe how hard it is to get these wants met.
It has been a longstanding legend that French chefs test the mettle of a new hire by having them cook an omelet. Is this a good test? I don’t know, I’ve never been asked to do it and I’ve never asked it of a hire, but I can understand the concept behind the legend. A great omelet takes patience and understanding of the nature of proteins, heat, conductivity, time, and seasoning. It takes knowledge, but also care.
The cook has to care about what he or she is making. It may just be a beaten egg and some fat in a hot pan, but the end result must taste good, look good, and feel good. Why? Because eating is more than acquiring mere sustenance, it is an experience. When I pay for others to cook for me, I’m paying for the entire experience. In fact, most people feel this way, without necessarily being aware of it.
Every bad breakfast experience I’ve had has been the result of restaurateurs failing to fulfill this truth. The many reasons why are for another essay, for now suffice it to say that when a manager, owner, chef, or combination of all three have orchestrated well with the understanding that people are paying for the experience as much as the food, my needs have always been met, or at least met closely enough that the shortcomings didn’t matter.
Those places care and have become near and dear to our hearts. One example from home is Gracie’s on Main. From humble beginnings, they’ve bloomed into something enviable. This would not be possible if they just went through the motions slopping edibles onto plates on rapid fire.
Our hunt in Florida is ever on for something of this nature. Not for something exact—for the products of people are never exact, they are as varied as the fingerprints that form them—but for something with similar passion, concern, and culinary skill. We may have found our answer in The Recipe Box.
The Recipe Box Family Diner
147 East Bloomingdale Avenue
Brandon, FL 33511
Phone: (813) 655-2686
Hours: Sunday to Saturday – 7:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
www.recipeboxdiner.net
The Recipe Box breakfast menu is fairly standard and it gets points from my wife for serving breakfast all day. As a bonus, lunch is served all day as well, and that is a sweet feature for me because I’m not always feeling like breakfast foods. Some mornings, I could eat a Reuben and it’s nice to know there is a place down the road that can meet my irresponsible needs. This particular morning, I was feeling breakfasty, so I scrolled along the laminated sheet for something eggy, porky, and toasty that could sate my hunger without blowing an o-ring.
The first thing I noticed was that their prices were reasonable. They weren’t the cheapest, but they weren’t high-end boutique prices either. Five bucks will get you two eggs, grits, and toast. An additional 2.25 will get you the meat if you crave it (turkey or swine). Essentially, a filling and tasty breakfast for one with a coffee can be had for ten dollars. That isn’t a budget breakfast, to say the least, but here, you get what you pay for: quality, quantity and good service in a comfortable and clean establishment.
Your everlovin’ hypocrite, I ditched my intentions for a simple two egg breakfast when I spied the Cpl. Clint’s Chicken. Whoever designed the menu earned their pay. Truthfully, my eyes first landed on the Southern Style Eggs, which did appeal to me, but the fried chicken won me over. This is a danger when self-medicating with food.
I ordered the Cpl. Clint’s Chicken: fried, with eggs over medium (stressing the “medium” as always). Still gun-shy about poorly fried potatoes, I opted for grits. Christa ordered her usual: two eggs scrambled with toast and bacon. And a pancake. We then fixed our coffees from the plentiful bowl of creamers (bonus points). The wait was not long.
The food arrived and it looked fantastic. My two eggs were stacked over a healthy layer of creamy sausage gravy poured over a nice sized breast of chicken fried to a nice crispy golden brown and perched across a split country biscuit. Wedged beside it was a monkey bowl of steamy grits.
Christa’s eggs were bright yellow, cooked firm but tender in giant curds, seemingly in a pan, not spread over a flat top grill. Her bacon was an enviable pile of mahogany strips that took up over half the plate-estate and the pancake was as large as the plate that bore it, golden brown and dusted with powdered sugar. A spread of soft butter from the plentiful bowl of sealed, room temperature tubs (more bonus points) glided over it nicely without tearing the crust. Her toast arrived with a crisp brown surface pre-buttered, but she added another dose before smoothing on the jelly.
I took a bite of grits. They were creamy, cooked perfectly and seasoned nicely. I added a dash and a tub of butter because I could and the great grits became that much better. Next, I cut into my eggs, the thickened yolks of a perfect over-medium flowed over the sausage gravy and down the side of a biscuit half. A wedge of egg, chicken, gravy, and biscuit was popped piping hot into my mouth. That wasn’t smart, but I avoided singing my taste buds.
It was delicious. The crisp breading of the chicken was seasoned well, though muted by the equally well-seasoned peppery sausage gravy. The biscuit was flaky and soft with a good crumb texture that soaked up the yolk and gravy. I dredged another cut of chicken through the mixture and savored it with slow deliberate chews. This went on for some time before I returned to earth.
Christa enjoyed her eggs and really loved the bacon. It had a nice smokey flavor, salty and crispy. It was good basic bacon. She cut her fork into the pancake. It was fluffy and moist, but the flavor was not especially fantastic—an average pancake, though cooked very well. The batter was just unexceptional. Certainly a step above all-purpose box mix, but still lacking whatever it is that makes better pancakes memorable, for her.
The Recipe Box is not the same as our beloved Gracie’s. The owners and cooks are not the same people and any traits they share that result in quality products are veiled in the back of the house. What is on full display is delicious food, consistently prepared correctly with care, and a desire to please the customer. The Recipe Box is stuffed with it.
The tables are stocked with plenty of sweeteners, creamers, jellies, and butter pats. The service is prompt, polite, and attentive. The interior is bright, clean, and inviting. The staff seems to enjoy working there and the customers seem to enjoy eating there. Nothing is being done mechanically and out of necessity; the work is being done voluntarily for the joy of it.
Now, no one is purely altruistic. The staff wants to get paid and the customers want to eat. But both have options and they all seem to be opting for The Recipe Box with pleasure. It shows in the food and atmosphere. We like eating here, not only for their product but for the entire experience. It’s pleasant and worth our time and expense. We both agree that we’ve found our regular breakfast spot for tasty vittles and will eagerly return when we get that feeling for victual healing.
Thanks for reading!