Review Published in "Best of New Orleans"
THE BROKEN EGG CAFE has left the Northshore littered with satisfied breakfast diners.
WHAT: The Broken Egg Cafe
CUISINE: Breakfast, brunch and lunch
WHEN: Breakfast and lunch Tuesday through Sunday
WHERE: 200 Girod St., Mandeville, (504) 624-3388
CARDS: Major
I break about 1,600 eggs a week," says Ron Green, owner and manager of his aptly named breakfast eatery, the Broken Egg Cafe. Such large-scale destruction inspired Green's concept for his restaurant's logo, a rooster standing on the shattered shells of his own offspring. "I wanted a real cocky rooster, who looks like he accidentally stepped on his own eggs," says Green. "I don't know where that idea came from exactly, but you know how males are."
Hungry travelers from New Orleans arrive at the Broken Egg Cafe by crossing the Causeway, taking a sharp right turn and following the narrow turning road through piney woods until eventually reaching Mandeville's Gerard Street, where antique shops cluster. Another right turn toward the lake brings you to the 80-year-old house of barge board and heart pine that Green began to renovate in 1994 and then opened as a restaurant in 1996. A graveled, manicured parking lot across the street and a goldfish pond in front complete the cultivated, rustic picture.
Inside the house are exposed brick, terra cotta walls decorated with copper posts, murals of sea oaks dripping with Spanish moss, and matching checkered curtains and tablecloths. Green lived in the house during the two years it took him to do the renovation with his own hands. "It was mostly intact, but it needed to be brought back to life." He then lived in the upstairs during the restaurant's first year of operation. Such sweat equity leaves him more than just strongly attached to his business. "I've had people ask me if they can put their table in the ladies room because they love that room. It's so spacious and purple and pretty," reports Green. "Now, I'm proud that people recognize that."
Green has not always focused his professional judgment on what shade of purple to paint the ladies room. Before the Broken Egg Cafe, he had been redesigning launch pads at Cape Canaveral in Florida, and most recently was a facility designer for the Department of Energy, working on a superconducting super collider facility in Hammond. Budget cuts in 1994 required the doors of that facility to close; after 25 years in the field, he considered other possibilities. "I had what I like to call a mid-life clarity," he explains. "Not a crisis, but a clarity."
The epiphany came when Green looked around his town and realized that he did not have any of what he refers to as "high-end" breakfast options. So he wrote five letters to breakfast restaurants in San Diego that he had admired and asked the owners if they would teach him how to run a business like theirs. Three positive responses came back, one from the Broken Yolk and another from the Good Egg. Green purchased the rights to the menu from the Good Egg and then combined the two names for his own place. Since he opened in 1996, Green has regionalized the original menu. Now he offers such omelettes as the Grand Isle, featuring shrimp ($8.45); the Mardi Gras, filled with crawfish ($8.45); Lafitte's tortilla -- scrambled eggs, chorizo, green chilies and onions ($7.75); and an egg-smothered croissant with broccoli, tomatoes and mild green chilies, called the Pontchartrain ($7.25).
Although Green had to leave town to learn the multitude of exotic things that can be served with scrambled eggs, he has enhanced the Californian's vast array of egg-related creations with the Louisianian's favorite: banana's Foster ($6.95), which his menu declares "a bona fide humming experience!" One noteworthy item that might go overlooked due to its modest placement in the lower left-hand corner of the menu is the blackberry grits ($1.95). This is a warmed blackberry compote poured over your classic, creamy, bland, slightly lumpy and profoundly comforting grits. It is, in fact, the nicest thing anyone has ever done to grits, and you'll never find that on a menu in San Diego, where grits are something you scrape off your headlights.
The high-end breakfast business has been so good that Green has opened two other Broken Egg Cafes, one in Destin, Fla., and the other in nearby Covington. But he still shares partnership for this concept with the original company in California. "When are you going to open another Broken Egg?" is a frequent question. The answer is that Green is in the process of trademarking the name Another Broken Egg, which he would wholly own and be free to franchise. Word has spread, it seems, and Green claims to have received more than 70 requests from restaurateurs all over the country to purchase a franchise of Another Broken Egg. This flare-up of interest in his concept leaves Green modestly reviewing the map and his place in it.
"I plan to open everywhere from all the way up to Montgomery, Alabama, down to Boca Raton, Florida," he announces of his long-term business plan. "My goal is to litter the Gulf Coast with broken eggs."
