Find Better Eggs Benedict than Little Pete's And I'll Give You A Dollar

Last month, I was at the Brooklyn Inn on Hoyt Street and I overheard someone say they’d been to nearby Prime Meats earlier that day for brunch and had eaten the best Eggs Benedict ever. I laughed, I cried, and I hurled on her.

Not really. But I had to investigate. I didn’t even know her, but I had to walk over to her little group and ask her how it’s even possible. I had to ask her the question that anyone who thinks they’ve had the best Eggs Benedict must be asked: Have you been to Little Pete’s in Philly? She hadn’t. Poor girl.

That’s the thing. You think you’ve had great Eggs Benedict, and you probably have. I mean, some people do it with salmon, or do other dirty things to that little English Muffin (by the way, did you hear this guy's story about the secret Thomas's Nooks and Crannies). When I was in Austin, Texas, Magnolia Café (their sign says “Sorry – We’re Open”) had this amazing take on E.B. called eggs zapatino, a fabbo confabulation of scrambled eggs and queso, and while getting the sliced ham is extra, it’s still less than $8.

Enough about that. Little Pete’s. Their take on Eggs Benedict (look at that picture and drool on yourself, I just did) is to put two English Muffins at the bottom of their own little dish, and build on that foundation with perfectly poached eggs, and a definitely hard-to-cut (who cares?) coupla slices of country ham, and then a bucketload of hollandaise sauce and some kind of cheesy topping that gets bubbly, brown, and seriously, just look at it? How the hell are you ever going to top that? I think it has less than 3,400 calories too. So it's HEALTHY!

Maybe it can happen. Maybe someone can top that. Eggs Benedict, at his core, is an elegant dish. It’s hard to do really well, I mean I love the Red Lion Inn in the Berkshires but theirs are just average and kind of weird. Cooking with hollandaise sauce involves doing good things with uncooked egg yolks, and that's not easy. And Canadian Bacon alone would be. Well. It's just Canadian (although in Canada, it's just called "bacon," and they have something else called "Canadian back bacon" - and I think they call it something called peameal or something too - that's even worse). The point is, it's Canadian. And that's FINE. Not that there's anything WRONG with Sidney Crosby.

So basically, I’m just going to give you an order. I don’t care how the Eggs Benedict is at the Waldorf, or the Palm, or Prime Meats, or wherever. The E.B. argument starts with Little Pete’s, and until someone proves otherwise, it ends there too. Go there.

And P.S. The place is in a good ‘hood in Philly, but it's a crampitated little 24-hour diner. And don’t order anything else for breakfast. Don’t share the omelettes (I’m not saying that they’re bad), don’t get French Toast. Don’t be a stupid idiot. Get the Eggs Benedict and thank me. Don't be a traitor. Benedict.

And if you find ones that are better, challenge me on this. Seriously. Do it. We'll go together. I'll buy (if they're not expensive.)

Perfection Ratings: Eggs Benedict at Little Pete's in Philly (the one on S 17th St)

What’s Closest to Perfect? The little dish, the sauce, the bubbly topping, the meat, the eggs, the friggin EVERYTHING.

What’s Furthest From Perfect? The meat is hard to cut, even with that flimsy steak knife they give you.

How’s the atmosphere? The booths are too small, the place is cramped, the waitresses are curt but friendly, and the taskmaster that runs the place and seats you has the most perfect mustache since Keith Hernandez.

Does my search for Eggs Benedict perfection end or continue: I'm skeptical that anyone can do this dish better.

Motorino and My Four Tenets of Pizzaness

Motorino Pizza - 319 Graham Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 718-599-8899

After watching Spain destroy the Dutch , 1-0, in the highest scoring sporting event in history (clearly I wrote this entry months ago), Danielle and I walked from Matt Torrey’s elegantish sports bar to the Williamsburg version of Mathieu Palombino's Motorino for some pizza. We sat right by their oven, one of those giant brick ones with wood inside it. You can like, see the fire. It was burning.

We ordered a tomato salad (amazingly fresh slices of yellow and red tomatoes salted properly, with fresh basil laying on them and a bit of olive oil drizzled in good proportion. Not drenched.)

For pizza, we ordered the 14-incher with the fresh, buffalo mozzarella, figuring it would be just big enough. It definitely was. (That's what SHE said.)

Here’s the thing about this pizza: It had that burnt look and taste, which I love, but Danielle doesn’t. A lot of people don’t love it, in fact, and I have to admit that the burntness overpowered everything just a smidgen too much, even for my perfect taste buds. I noticed other pizzas coming out of the oven were charred relatively similarly. I wouldn’t call these pizzas your basic thin crusters because the edge of the crust had gigantic bubbles, something you won’t always get at John’s, Lombardi’s, Grimaldi’s, Patsy’s, or any of those other thin slice havens. There was, in general, more crust on Motorino’s pizza (a little like Lucali, which I'll post about soon).

The pie is cut into four gigantic slices (As shown in this photo of the pepperoni pie I stole from Motorino's Web site) and let me tell you, the cheese was so so so fresh that I don’t know I’ve ever had better cheese on a pizza in my life. That’s how good it was.

The sauce – and I’m a believer that if your pizza is good, you don’t need a lot of sauce – was JUST enough. It didn’t overpower the cheese, and it shouldn’t have. The obvious leaves of fresh basil made for quite an excellent coupla slices. Also, one thing that even some great pizza places do horribly is not know how to perfectly salt the top of the crust – the part not covered by cheese or sauce – with REALLY GOOD salt. No such problem at Motorino. It was salted wonderfully.

Real quick, for the sake of this blog that will probably have more than one posting about pizza, I must announce my four tenets of pizzaness. If you find yourself disagreeing with me for some reason, maybe this can be a guide as to why:

1. Pizza in New York is like sex anywhere: Even when it’s bad, it’s good. It’s tough to get a really bad grade on pizza even if you’re Famous Semi-Original Ray’s On 84th Street. That’s what makes it perhaps the toughest food to analyze. It’s something that can be done reasonably well by anyone – I can make good-tasting pizza four different ways in my own regular oven – but exceptionally well by only a few. You remember great sex, and you remember great pizza.

2. If I’m ordering pizza from a reasonably prominent place, I’m always going to try their most basic pie first. That’s the only way to go. Things like sausage or pepperoni or even fresh vegetables can skew the taste – good or bad – and I don’t want that. It’s the pizza, stupid.

3. Too much sauce on pizza, or any Italian food in general, is a sign of some sort of over-compensation, like blindly pouring buckets of parmesan cheese on everything from your stromboli to your wine glass. Socially awkward people want to seem more comfortable to others. So they drown themselves in the sauce. Subpar pizzas try not to show off their bubbly little warts, either. So they too drown themselves in the sauce.

4. The same goes for too much cheese, too much of a garlic taste (I love garlic, but not so much garlic that I can’t kiss anyone for 7 months.).

Perfection Ratings: Motorino

What’s Closest to Perfect? The cheese, the sauce/cheese proportion.

What’s Furthest From Perfect? Just a bit too burnt of a flavor, overpowers some of the good things about the pie.

How’s the atmosphere? It’s airy, and windowy, and you can see the oven, there’s a modern-looking bar. A big loud family came when we were about to leave, and they just set up one gigantic long table and accommodated them well. There’s also a big chalkboard with the beer list, which has some great local brews from Red Hook, etc. I like chalkboards.

Does my search for the perfect pizza end or continue? continues