Finger licking in Romania: Ep.8 That late breakfast place

During weekends I eat breakfast late. If I eat it at all. For sure during week days I skip over "the most important meal of the day". For me it is as important as the mood of the moment is.

On the other hand, eating breakfast in restaurant (be it of the hotel I'm staying in or otherwise) is by far my favorite part of the morning. If I can, I never skip it. Maybe it's a thing with the meal being just there, ready to be taken and eaten; I guess that my lazy ass is intrigued by that. It's not like I don't enjoy cooking or I despise bringing food from the fridge, but both of these actions I do based on my mood. If I feel like doing it, alright. If I don't, well I'll just be just a couch potato this Saturday, because my mood may be drinking coffee for 6 hours while alternating between watching political news and playing some game on my XBOX on the other HDMI. That's how lazy I get when my daughter is out to her grandparents.

And BY FAR our favourite way to spend a good breakfast is by going to fancy places, pretending to be rich. Oh, the sin! It's not like you can't afford it once every 6 months, but it's just that kind of morning when everybody around you looks so precious that you are afraid they'll fucking break like porcelain if they even fart. Bucharest is full of these "bistros" which were invented here something like 10-15 years back max. If you want to have a glossy life in Bucharest you'll have to party like a fucking drunkard during the night but never miss the 10:00 o'clock late breakfast in one of these places. The damn alcohol doesn't even have time to metabolize.

Give it a French name and it must taste good!

Well, it doesn't really work like that...

About the taste I mean. About the clientele... I wouldn't worry about it. The French name of "Rue du pain" attracts clients like flies to a turd and the placing, well you can call it that kind of place in town where you want your car to be seen. It's more a bakery at its essence but it also packs a high-level bistro that poses to be on the same line with the bakery: artisanal. Whatever that word means these days.

It's a nice, pretentious place, especially if you get lucky as we did and had a fine, sunny morning to it. The kid was happy because she made other clients uncomfortable starring at their meals, while we enjoyed that good cup of coffee while checking out what mundane VIPs are around us.

That French, pretentious name can come in handy also for those moments when you had a one night stand and you don't want to be a swine and send her on her way straight out of bed. It works great with the idea that you want to impress her you know? Nice, French bakery, expensive coffee, over-priced croissoants, cars more expensive than a kidney on the alley. For sure she'll think you want to marry her and will not suspect that the phone number you gave her is on a one-use-only, prepaid SIM card. It will make you feel better about yourself...

The irony of the complex this place is set in, is the fact that it used to be a communist alimentary place. That kind of a place where Ceaușescu packed many types of stores, with virtually nothing inside. You would window shop air over here, in the '80s. People would come and join hundreds of meters ques, would wait for tens of hours sometimes, only to leave with 3 yogurts, 2 loaves of bread and MAYBE 1 kilogram of meat.

Now it's a place of abbundance, a place where a loaf of bread costs something like 5-6 normal ones and a coffee is as expensive as a damn soup, 3 blocks away. I don't know how many of the clients of these places think about this because I guess they would ask for a little bit better services for their money if they did.

Looks too good to be true!

I really hate that Instagram and its peers transformed society to such a level that practically it keeps alive places with low-level food. It looks good... but it really isn't. If it were some kind of beauty contest for breakfasts, this place would probably be in top 10 in Romania. But in the end it's also about the taste and the way you combine things to be incredible in your mouth AND if possible, look damn good.

See that tomato in the first picture? Plastic. Even worse... bakelite. I don't know if I'm crazy and way too critic but if you write "artisanal" in your description, do some fucking efforts to have all the ingredients in your recipe in this way. Eating apple-like cherry tomatoes isn't among the things I consider "artisanal". To be sincere, I don't need a tomato on the dish only to look good. I would go without it but when you pay on a damn sandwich the amount you would pay for a turkey fillet somewhere else, then you expect that the tomatoes' origin is controlled and you bring TASTY ones. I really don't care if they had fucking poison sprayed on them while riping but the taste is a must when you surpass a certain level.

And the cheese... look, I'm a cheese guy. I try all sorts of cheese and I passed the level when I go to the normal supermarket and buy the packed "blue cheese". Moreover, that is not the kind of cheese to cut a slice as thick as a finger and just put it on a slice of bread to eat it with rucolla. The balance of the taste is going to be totally out of proportions in the favour of cheese and if that cheese is also the cheap type, you're in for some bad taste in your mouth.

I don't know if you enjoy trying special types of cheese but if you do, you must have happened to try it with walnuts. It's delicious if the cheese is high level and the damn walnuts are well dried and kept safe from moisture cause if they are not they will immediately have that rotten taste inside of them and everything is ruined. Do they look good? Yes, they still do but the client will never come back to you if you give him walnuts that leave a taste in their mouth as if they sucked all day long on a rat's tail.

Please observe the hungry hand on the right...

Everybody nowadays break some eggs, throws some vegetables inside the mix, puts some on the side of the dish, fry it like it's a damn pancake and wraps it up so the nice colours can be seen from the airplane windows. Taste? Who the fuck cares anymore? What happened to scrambled mother fuckers?! Do you know about scrambled, the recipe of our grand-grand-fathers, that fed them anywhere their horse would take them? Sometimes it's worth to give it a try because it's damn tasty and for sure it doesn't preserve that nasty fried smell and taste like these omlettes pancakes do.

I didn't try this dish, it was of my beloved and for me, it really didn't look special... or tasty. She didn't complain but I know that she had better (there's a place in Budapest where we once ate an incredible omelette so for sure she is always comparing them with that one...).

Next time I'm around, this one is not an option anymore. I had much better morning meals in other, pretentious places around, which takes your money for taste as well as for atmosphere and preciousness.

Had a better breakfast in gas stations for God's sake...

Posted also on my blog www.ddma.ro, a place on the world wide web where I'm trying to promote Steemit, my writings and my country. In that order. I post through the @steempress-io plugin and I make my life easier (writing and formatting in Wordpress is much easier than on steemit.com or busy.org)