EAT BREAKFAST
MORNING PEOPLE ARE scarce in the restaurant world, and the question of breakfast seems to confound a lot of chefs. Should they eat it? Can they drink it? What happens if they ignore it altogether? And why is it (I’ve wondered this myself) that you most want a big breakfast the morning after eating a big dinner?
“Yes! What’s that about?” asks Andrea Reusing, who has experienced the same weirdness. Knowing that you ate heavily the night before, should you give in to the unexplained desire for the full English breakfast, or put yourself on an austerity plan of green tea and grapefruit? Reusing is, like several of her colleagues, ambivalent about a morning meal. “I’m not a huge breakfast person, but I’ll eat a bowl of cereal, or an egg, or fruit.” Or just as easily, she says, “I can have a couple of cups of coffee and not need to eat until lunch.” Nancy Silverton doesn’t eat in the morning. Neither does Ted Lee, who says, “Everyone says you need breakfast for energy, but I’ve never experimented with that. I eat breakfast and I want to take a nap.”
Melissa Perello is another breakfast skipper; she goes right to yoga or the green market or out to walk her dog, Dingo. All of those options sound reasonable to me, yet Perello expresses some doubts about whether they are the healthiest things she could be doing. Then she shrugs off her doubt. Perhaps she isn’t starting every day with yogurt and wheat germ, but “I’m not eating Little Gem doughnuts.” Hard to argue: Eating nothing until later must be better than starting the day with junk food. If you function well without a substantial morning meal, then eating one you don’t want is just adding calories to your day.
Plenty of other chefs do eat breakfast, however, and many have habits worth adopting. Here are a few variations on their mornings.
Lesson 18: Smart chefs eat oatmeal
Unless they are on full carb lockdown, the most popular choice among chefs who eat breakfast is oatmeal. Nate Appleman became devoted to it as he dropped about a hundred pounds. It’s useful to remember that oatmeal starts as a neutral base and you can either fancy it up with healthy accoutrements (fresh fruit, nuts) or you can use it as a sponge for brown sugar and render it as unhealthy as a box of rainbow-colored kiddie cereal. Resist that, and think like a chef: What else can I put on this canvas? Rick Moonen adds flax seeds, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, and just a drop of maple syrup. “Tastes like a Red Hot, and makes you feel really good,” he says. “It gives me a little flush.” Mark Bittman: “I like strong flavors: oatmeal with peanut butter or soy sauce. I’ll have oatmeal with tapenade. Americans eat too much sweet stuff.”
If you can remember to make the time (about thirty minutes), steel-cut oats are popular with chefs for a reason: They taste wonderful and have a more pleasing texture than rolled oats. But if you can’t give it that kind of time, no matter. Sang Yoon contents himself with instant oatmeal at home too.
Lesson 19: They let breakfast shape the day to come
“Breakfast sets the tone for how I am going to eat for the rest of the day,” says Sue Torres. She’s lean and athletic and intense, and adamant about getting up and taking the time to eat something beneficial. “I feel like if I am just grabbing food on the go because I’m rushed, chances are it’s going to be the same pace for lunch and for dinner. I stop and say, ‘Okay, you have a busy day; you need to fuel up with the right stuff, the stuff that is going to carry you for three or four hours.’”
Torres always keeps Greek yogurt and fruit stocked, and sometimes blends them into a shake. Oatmeal or granola make regular appearances, and in summer she favors cottage cheese and cantaloupe—a combination that feels mildly retro to me, but that means it is probably due for a comeback. Usually, though, she goes heartier: eggs, bacon. “I’ve even had French fries, steak, and eggs for breakfast, because my Puerto Rican grandmother would make that every now and then for us. Oh, and plantains—just so much food it was ridiculous.”
Susur Lee feels that a bowl of muesli is the best thing to both give energy and wake up the digestive system. “I eat this every morning,” he tells me when we meet during one of his frequent visits to New York from Toronto. He wants to leave the breakfast table feeling satisfied, yet with an appetite for what will come during his workday. Since a lot of store-bought muesli is high in sugar, he makes his own, then has it ready to eat with yogurt and a drizzle of honey. His version, which contains nuts, oats, seeds, and two kinds of dried fruit, is a lot better-tasting than the boxed stuff. If you can find the ingredients in bulk, it’s also cheaper. I made some and labeled the container “Mues-Lee.” Feel free to copyright that, Susur.
Lesson 20: They find a breakfast that appeals, even when the idea of breakfast doesn’t
“I never used to eat breakfast, but I’ve read how bad it is to skip it, because your metabolism never has a chance to get started,” says Naomi Pomeroy. “So I started eating breakfast, a piece of wheat toast with my tea.” Same deal across the country: Michelle Bernstein tells me, “In the last two years I’ve forced myself to become the kind of person who eats breakfast, since I started working out more.” One of her preworkout breakfasts is a customized granola bar that she orders over the Internet. “You tell them online what ingredients you want in the bars and they make them for you. I have to have a say in everything I eat.” Find them at Youbars.com.
When she isn’t ordering from the iTunes of granola bars, she makes a fast protein-centered breakfast. “Something simple. I love peanut butter, so I try to get peanut butter in—I crave it when I wake up. Or I eat yogurt. Or a nice egg.”
“A nice egg.” That’s precisely how she put it, adding that she doesn’t eat bread in the morning. We should all face at least some days with “a nice egg.” Get the best quality you can find, though those needn’t come in brown shells or be tastefully speckled, like the ones Martha Stewart collects from the chickens in her yard. Go for those from free-roaming chickens, no antibiotics. However, no matter how nice the egg, it was a leap for me to follow Michelle’s lead and omit the toast necessary to mop up the yolk. An egg by itself on a plate is a melancholy thing. It is the Morrissey of breakfasts.
Enter spinach. Inspired by chefs who eat vegetables in the morning (there are many), I discovered that sautéing a big bunch of fresh spinach—or, even better, mostly stemless baby spinach—can be done in the same pan in which you fry your egg. Canola spray, then spinach into the pan. After a quick stir to get all the leaves engaged in what’s going on, crack an egg (or two) on top. Cover and cook over medium-low heat until the whites are opaque and the yolks still moving enough to become a sauce for the spinach when it all hits your plate. Pinch of flaky salt. That is a breakfast I could eat any day.
Lesson 21: They slow down and make breakfast a family meal
Because chefs are so often working during their children’s dinner hour, breakfast is a way to sit down with the kids and bond over a meal, even if it is just a bowl of cereal and milk. Marc Murphy is happy to let his young son run breakfast each morning. Act one of his day often begins with his son pronouncing, “Daddy, let’s go have breakfast!” How can you skip breakfast when you have that kind of invitation?
Breakfast with the family also motivates them to eat something at least as healthy as what they are feeding the kids. “I have breakfast with my daughter every day,” says Alex Guarnaschelli. “It’s an effort to encourage her to eat breakfast more than anything else. And because I think breakfast is important to get the metabolism going. We have fruit, oatmeal, yogurt with cereal—I’ll sort of take my cue from what she’ll have.”
Wolfgang Puck will always sit down with his two young boys, even if he doesn’t always share the same meal. “If they have oatmeal or cereal, I will,” says Puck. “But I don’t eat their pancakes or waffles.”
On days off, Murphy does something more involved. “This weekend my daughter had a sleepover. I got up and made a broccoli-and-Parmesan frittata for them. They said, ‘It’s like pizza.’ Kids love pesto, so I’ll do green eggs. My daughter loves an English muffin with peanut butter. Good when you have a hangover, I find! Or we’ll go to Chinatown; one of my favorite breakfasts is congee with dried scallops at Big Wong King, and steamed Chinese vegetables with oyster sauce.”
I’m usually home at dinnertime, and can sit down with my son at that time. But breakfast with a kid in the house has made me think about eating better myself. It’s hard to justify being both the parent who lectures on the importance of starting the day with a healthy meal—and also the harried woman racing to the first meeting of the day on nothing but a cup of coffee, who by eleven a.m. is falling face-first into a bagel.
Lesson 22: They have a routine
The morning, particularly when you’re up early for exercise following a late night, is not the time to start pondering change. Find what works and go with it. Thomas Keller alternates between a few standard breakfast choices. “Some days, two eggs, scrambled,” he says. “Or a cereal with low-fat milk, usually Fiber One,” to which he will add flax seeds and chia seeds (yes, the very same that make a Chia Pet grow; they have protein, healthy fats, and several minerals). “Once or twice a week, I’ll do a protein shake with low-fat Greek yogurt and a banana,” he says. “And every day for my beverage I’ll do a probiotic, let me tell you the exact name of it—hold on….” He pads across the kitchen and comes back with the answer: Green Vibrance, which I later learn is a powdered blend of spirulina, seaweeds, edible grasses, vegetables, probiotic cultures and, well, some other stuff. (It’s a long list.) “I’ll have that with my vitamins, and then an espresso. That’s mornings.”
Ming Tsai also follows a routine, one that includes his own potent cocktail of healthy stuff. Into his blender goes a vanilla soy-based protein powder (“couple of tablespoons”), a banana, a tablespoon of green powder (“wheatgrass and all these good things for you”—it sounds similar to Keller’s), a teaspoon of flax seeds, and some rice milk. The blended result is, he says, “a delicious, green Star Wars–looking shake.”
The use of these pulverized nutritional powders strikes me as a bit of a departure from the whole-food/real-food philosophy to which most chefs subscribe. But there’s an appealing hippie-science geek charm about blending bananas, flax, and so on that reminds me less of Star Wars and more of a scene from another film from the same year: Richard Dreyfuss mixing wheat germ, soya, and honey in The Goodbye Girl, while explaining to Marsha Mason, “My body is a temple . . . and I am worshiping it.” Having a healthy, sippable, filling breakfast blend that you can toss together with one lobe of your brain still sleeping is a great idea. Ming has his alone, or accompanied by a piece of dense wheat-free, three-grain toast (Mestemacher is his brand of choice) with a slice of tomato and a few dots of olive oil.
When he began what became a 120-pound weight loss, Art Smith stuck with steel-cut oatmeal with berries and an egg-white omelet with vegetables. He named it the “Art Start,” and put it on some of his restaurant menus. With his routine in place, he can now treat breakfast as a sort of reboot button, particularly if he goes off his usual diet on the previous day.
“Like last night, I had the most delicious Barack Obama burger at Spike’s place,” he tells me when we meet in Washington. (His friend Spike Mendelsohn’s Good Stuff Eatery has a burger named for the president, topped with bacon, onion marmalade, Roquefort cheese, and horseradish mayonnaise.) “It was so delicious, with fries and a milk shake—I just had this food fiesta,” says Smith, still delighting in this rare indulgence. “Then I got up this morning and started my journey back to wellness. You can still do these things, but you also have to keep going back to basic whole foods, to the miracles of oatmeal, the miracles of water.”
Adding breakfast to a day that previously lacked it was a big part of both Nate Appleman’s and Alex Stratta’s routines and subsequent major weight losses. I’ve noticed that particularly among the guys who have dropped big numbers on the scale, having a regimen is everything. The same breakfast, the same lunch, a don’t-miss workout appointment. It appears to be an antidote to the chaotic eating that once ruled their lives. Each wakes up to the whir of the blender. Stratta likes a mix of fresh berries, a banana, protein powder, soy milk, and coconut water. Appleman’s recipe, which includes almond butter and honey, follows.
Lesson 23: Smart chefs don’t let their coffee deliver loads of sugar or fat
Is it the hours they keep, or the easy access to the espresso machine? For whatever reason, chefs drink a lot of coffee. “My day always starts out with two cappuccinos, each with two shots of espresso. It’s a ritual. It’s part of waking up, like reading the paper,” says Nancy Silverton. This is the big league. I myself idle way too high to take in that much caffeine, but Silverton tells me with a shot of pride, “I could drink an espresso falling asleep in bed.”
Rick Moonen: three espressos. Naomi Pomeroy: an Americano. Colorado chef Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson: cappuccino. Of the regular-coffee folk, Tom Colicchio sometimes drinks as many as four cups before he leaves the house. Donatella Arpaia admits to a time when she used to drink four to eight cups throughout a day.
The trouble with coffee isn’t the coffee. It’s what it can carry along with the coffee. Ted Lee and Matt Lee are both quite slim, but they noticed, says Ted, that “the main threat to our waistlines is the heavily sugared, half-and-halfed coffee we drink in the morning.” Adds Matt, “I’m down to one cup. But I won’t compromise on the sugar and the half-and-half.” If you can’t cut down on the number of cups, consider the formulation. Arpaia had a two-packets-of-sugar-per-cup habit. “With eight cups a day, that is a lot of sugar,” she says. So she weaned herself off the stuff. “I went from two packets, to one packet, to half, to none. You train your palate that way.” Colicchio too says he no longer automatically puts milk and sugar in his coffee.
I once believed that such a thing was impossible to do, until I observed that the way I was drinking coffee—with whole milk and sugar—tasted suspiciously like coffee ice cream in hot liquid form. I experimented with different roasts and beans until I found one I could love straight up. This was the most major step in retraining my palate to embrace tastes beyond sweet and salty—the two that my taste buds demand with the greatest frequency. There’s so much more out there: bitter lettuces and twiggy Japanese green tea and tart plain yogurt (minus the jammy fruit on the bottom). Expanding the range of foods you can enjoy in their natural state is crucial to healthy eating. So while I’m up here on this particular horse, I’d like to add that I feel, as a new member of the black-coffee club, I’ve earned the right to issue a tiny manifesto: No flavored coffees; coffee is a flavor.
Lesson 24: They have creative coffee substitutes
One might imagine Joe Bastianich starts each day with the steaming screech of an espresso machine. But lately, he says, he’s traded the caffeine in coffee for a piece (a small piece—not a bar) of dark chocolate. “It works,” he confirms. “And it’s more enjoyable.”
I love this. Could I do it? I’m not sure. Hard to imagine sauntering into the conference room at work with a square of Scharffen Berger 82 percent while everyone else is nursing their coffee mugs. But I do love that Joe does this. After years of being overweight he is now insanely fit and can eat pretty much whatever he wants. If what he wants instead of coffee with sugar is a piece of chocolate, he has it and totally enjoys it. This is an important point that, I think, bears repeating when you get up and are too groggy to remember: Know what you really want to eat, and then enjoy it without guilt. Haven’t we all, once in a while, eaten the breakfast we “should” eat and then, around about eleven a.m., sneaked in the treat that we were really craving?
Nate Appleman’s Breakfast Smoothie
The marathoning chef fuels up with this regularly. Tip: Peel and cut your bananas before freezing (store in plastic wrap). Yogurt without sugar is essential; the fruit and honey should provide enough sweetness.
serves 1 active person
COMBINE IN BLENDER:
1 frozen peeled banana, cut into 1-inch pieces
½ cup frozen peaches
¼ cup fresh blueberries
¼ cup plain yogurt
1 tablespoon almond butter
1 tablespoon honey
1 cup water
Pinch of salt
Blend until smooth.
Adapted from Nate Appleman.
Susur Lee’s Muesli
makes roughly 18 ¼-cup servings of muesli
1 cup raw oatmeal
½ cup raw almonds, chopped (or sliced)
½ cup raw walnut halves or pieces
½ cup raw hazelnuts
½ cup sunflower seeds
½ cup pumpkin seeds
½ cup dried cherries
½ cup raisins
Mix ingredients together and store in airtight container.
FOR SERVING:
1 tablespoon Greek yogurt
Milk or soy milk
Honey
Serve a portion (¼ to ½ cup) in bowl with Greek yogurt, a splash of milk, and a small trickle of honey.
Adapted from Susur Lee.