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How to find a good breakfast
Breakfast is the cheapest good meal available in most American towns, and the one where an unremarkable-looking place is most likely to be excellent. The signal is almost entirely about who is inside at seven in the morning.
What separates a good one from a bad one
- A full counter at 7am — Regulars eating alone at a counter on a weekday is the strongest signal in this entire category. It cannot be manufactured and it does not show up in a rating.
- A flat-top that has been running for decades — A well-seasoned griddle cooks eggs and hash browns differently, and the people who have been working it for years are the reason to be there.
- Home fries or hash browns done properly — The component most often phoned in. Crisp on the outside, cooked through, seasoned. A pale, steamed pile is a bad sign about everything else.
- Coffee that keeps coming — Not necessarily good coffee. A diner where the pot comes round without being asked is operating the way it should.
- Cash-only, no website, hand-written specials — Not a guarantee of anything, but these correlate with places that have not needed to market themselves in forty years.
What to order
- Eggs, however you like them, and judge them — The whole test. If they arrive exactly as ordered, everything else on the menu is probably fine.
- Regional breakfasts — Biscuits and gravy in the South, scrapple in Philadelphia, loco moco in Hawaii, migas in Texas, a bagel with lox where the bagels are boiled.
- The non-American traditions — Turkish kahvaltı, Chinese youtiao and soy milk, Japanese teishoku, Mexican chilaquiles, an Indian dosa or idli breakfast. All widely available and all under-ordered at breakfast.
- Whatever is on the hand-written board — It is there because they have it and they want to sell it today.
How Savor Scout looks for it
Breakfast searches weight early opening hours, counter service and reviews that mention regulars or long-running ownership. The matcher treats an absence of a website as neutral rather than negative, which sounds like a small thing and is the difference between finding the diner and finding the place with the best food photography.
Looking in a particular city?
Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.
- New York, NY
- Los Angeles, CA
- Chicago, IL
- Houston, TX
- Philadelphia, PA
- Phoenix, AZ
- San Antonio, TX
- San Diego, CA
- Dallas, TX
- San Jose, CA
- Austin, TX
- Indianapolis, IN
- Jacksonville, FL
- San Francisco, CA
- Columbus, OH
- Charlotte, NC
- Fort Worth, TX
- Detroit, MI
- El Paso, TX
- Memphis, TN
- Seattle, WA
- Denver, CO
- Washington, DC
- Boston, MA
- Nashville, TN
- Baltimore, MD
- Oklahoma City, OK
- Louisville, KY
- Portland, OR
- Las Vegas, NV
- Milwaukee, WI
- Albuquerque, NM
- Tucson, AZ
- Fresno, CA
- Sacramento, CA
- Long Beach, CA
- Kansas City, MO
- Mesa, AZ
- Virginia Beach, VA
- Atlanta, GA
- Colorado Springs, CO
- Omaha, NE
- Raleigh, NC
- Miami, FL
- Oakland, CA
- Minneapolis, MN
- Tulsa, OK
- Cleveland, OH
- Wichita, KS
- Arlington, TX
- New Orleans, LA
- Bakersfield, CA
- Tampa, FL
- Honolulu, HI
- Aurora, CO
- Anaheim, CA
- Santa Ana, CA
- St. Louis, MO
- Riverside, CA
- Corpus Christi, TX
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