The 50 best breakfast sandwiches | Let’s Eat

Egged on, we searched for great breakfast sandwiches. Today we offer 50 of our favorites. Also this week, we get into the Thanksgiving spirit with dining options, Craig LaBan offers a BYOB find in South Philly and a “treasure box” for cheese lovers, and — wait? News that a Jewish deli has opened inside a hospital? Can pastrami cure you? Read on.

— Mike Klein

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Breakfast is both the most important meal of the day and a prime chance for cooks to show off. Here’s our round-up of 50 outstanding breakfast sandwiches, from the Main Line to South Jersey. Shown above is the Smokey Sammy from Greg’s Kitchen in Manayunk, which tucks two fried eggs, mozzarella, a sausage patty, and a squirt of sriracha on a brioche bun with tots on the side. For one of my personal favorites, I need to head to a Home Depot, believe it or not.

📧 Eat or drink something tasty in the Philly area? Please share it with all of us.

🧂 Where are the restaurants open for dine-in on Thanksgiving? Hira Qureshi has the 411.

😋 How about Thanksgiving to go? Hira offers suggestions there, too, including pastelillos and pasteles.

🦃 Where to find a fresh turkey? We have options, including kosher and halal birds.

🧀 An award-winning Philly cheesemaker offers a Thanksgiving treasure box for cheese lovers, reports Craig LaBan.

🍴 Barbecue as a Friendsgiving event is the idea Saturday at Wissahickon Brewing Co., collaborating with Deke’s BBQ on a $30pp AYCE dinner (4-8 p.m.) of BBQ turkey, all the trimmings, and a first draft of beer, cider, or kombucha.

🍴 Enjoy a Ghanaian spin on Thanksgiving from chef Nana Wilmont (shown above at left with Elyse Parker, center, and Autumn Bey) as she cooks a Friendsgiving pop-up at 6 p.m. Sunday at Santé in South Philadelphia. Wilmon (Love That I Knead Supper Club) starts with her signature “bunz” bread and grilled Ghana salad with salmon roe, and includes tamarind harissa-glazed ham and suya fried turkey as mains. Sides are yam and collards with smoked turkey jus; charred okra with egusi granola; Jollof rice with goat; and yassa onion and tarragon-herbed stuffing. Dessert is cassava pone. It’s $100, drinks included, or $30 for a “leftover plate.” Details are here.

👀 Watch your inbox next Tuesday for a special edition of Let’s Eat, packed with last-minute Thanksgiving cooking and dining ideas as well as advice on where to entertain your out-of-town guests.

If food has you thinking about seeing a show, check out our latest “Two Critics, One Review” feature. With support from Visit Philadelphia, “Two Critics, One Review” is The Inquirer’s way of giving you two takes on the same show, so you can make the best decision about whether you want to go. This time, we sent columnist Jenice Armstrong and theater critic Rosa Cartagena to Macbeth in Stride, at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre through Sunday. It’s a bold take on the Scottish play told through a Black woman’s lens as she interrogates Lady Macbeth and challenges the Bard, and both Jenice and Rosa say they’ll never look at the Scottish play the same way again.

🍽️ Restaurant ideas near Broad and Spruce? Right across the street from the theater: the new Loch Bar (an elegant seafooder out of Baltimore), Garces Trading Co. (casual fare inside the Kimmel Center), Volvér (fancy setting, also at the Kimmel), and the swellegant Steak 48.

Local businesses are fundraising for Palestine. Richie’s Cafe in North Philadelphia is donating “every penny spent” on specials (through Saturday) to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for humanitarian aid in Gaza. At Lombard Cafe in Society Hill, proceeds from Saturday’s art-show fundraiser with a special limited menu will benefit the Egyptian Red Crescent. At the Bok building in South Philadelphia, Machine Shop and Cuzzy’s ice cream are participating in a charity raffle through Friday with Minimal Chaos, with all proceeds benefiting Palestine Children’s Relief Foundation. Hat-tip to colleague Hira Qureshi for spotting these.

Spread Bagelry will help raise funds and awareness for Best Buddies, a nonprofit dedicated to enhancing the lives of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, with a “Bagels and Buddies” fundraiser on Saturday from 11 a.m.–1 p.m. It is part of the grand opening of Spread’s Wynnewood store at 50 E. Wynnewood Rd. Ribbon-cutting will be at noon.

Neighbors of Illata, a 24-seat BYOB off South Street near 23rd, may want to keep it a secret. “Good luck,” says our critic Craig LaBan, who wants to tell EVERYBODY what chef-owner Aaron Randi and his crew are up to.

Things often get heated on Facebook. When a commenter on South Jersey’s Audubon Community group complained about the $14 price of the French onion soup at Cafe Le Jardin, chef-owner Richard “Todd” Cusack replied with class, not sass:

“What goes into $14 French onion soup?” he wrote. “It starts with simmering two stocks for 24 hours. One is a roasted duck stock. The other is a roasted veal stock. (Each takes about 45 minutes to an hour to prepare for the 24-hour simmer beforehand.) A cook must monitor the simmer throughout, skimming off all the fat to concentrate the flavors. While they’re being strained, reduced, and combined, which takes another three hours, you’re caramelizing 40 pounds of onions and toasting flour to thicken the broth. Then the flavor builds deeper and richer with the incorporation of three wines and sherry vinegar, to which you add that reduced stock, seasoning, and herbs, and cook that for another two hours. During that time, you’ll be de-rinding a 30-pound wheel of imported Comté cheese, then shredding it for the soup. It’ll take a lot less time to bake the crostini to accompany it, but you’re not going to serve that rich soup without fresh bread, are you? Everything comes from somewhere, and the food we serve comes from our hands, which were trained by chefs in a lineage stretching back centuries and continents. Or maybe it’s not that deep. But it’s more than sweating some onions over bouillon cubes. And either way, I’d love for you to come taste it.”

The upshot: hundreds of supportive comments for Cusack, who said reservations doubled and soup sales tripled in the last three weeks. “I think I owe her a free soup,” said Cusack, who also owns the luxe June BYOB in Collingswood.

Steaks, Italian food, and nightlife add up to “vibe dining,” the theme of the sultry SIN Philadelphia, setting its scene with a DJ. It opens Thursday in Northern Liberties with such cocktails as the pistachio martini below and flourishes like the cheese wheel roaming the dining room for tableside cacio e pepe.

The Lucky Well’s Ambler location will bow out in late December to make way for Cantina Feliz, relocating from nearby Fort Washington. The decision makes perfect business sense, the owners of both say.

Flight Club, an international darts parlor, will open next summer in Center City and we probably will always call it “Fight Club” by accident.

Fiore Fine Foods has completed its downsizing and move from South Philly to Kensington. It’s now simply called Fiore.

Federal Donuts is tweaking its name as it grows. Next stop: Vegas, baby.

Imminent Philly-area restaurant openings, besides SIN, include Bar Lesieur in Rittenhouse (Wednesday) and Monterey Grill in Mount Laurel (Saturday). There’s a crowded field of newcomers you can read about here.

Bunny Lyons of Bunnycakes Custom Cake & Cookie Boutique in Berlin (above) is featured on Food Network’s Holiday Wars’ “Manufacturing Mishap” episode. It premiered Sunday, but it’ll be replayed at noon Thursday. The setup: Three teams of artists must design a display illustrating a terrible mistake happening at Santa’s workshop.

Three Philadelphia restaurateurs turn up in the Robb Report’s peer-chosen list of “50 Most Powerful People in American Fine Dining.” Ellen Yin (Fork, a.kitchen, High Street) is #48, Marc Vetri (Vetri Cucina) is #38, and Stephen Starr (Parc, The Love, etc., etc.) is #20.

Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter is out with a book called The Upcycled Self: A Memoir on the Art of Becoming Who We Are. While chatting him up, Dan DeLuca asked him for his favorite Philly restaurants. He’s quite a foodie.

Delco’s John Chambers made a mobile Irish pub you can rent, writes Stephanie Farr. “I stop at Wawas and people come over and say, ‘Can I come see the inside?’ and they get blown away.”

Lentil & Co., a mission-driven, quick-serve Mediterranean restaurant in Ardmore, is sending proceeds from sales of its Cozy Lentil Soup to support Ardmore Food Pantry.

Royal Tavern, which had been closed since March 2020, reopened last week. What is the signature menu item?

A) stuffed pretzels

B) bacon cheeseburger

C) pork roll

D) crab cake

Find out if you know the answer.

Hop Sing Laundromat commissioned a full barrel — 144 bottles — of nine-year-old, 120-proof Knob Creek single-barrel bourbon as its house whiskey for the holiday season. Lê, as Hop Sing’s owner is known, added a custom label; the hootch’s name means “happiness” in Japanese.

I heard that a Jewish deli had opened inside a local hospital cafeteria. Any intel? — Bobby B.

Not only is it in a hospital cafeteria, Bobby, but it’s the cafeteria at St. Mary Medical Center on Langhorne Newtown Road in Langhorne. How interfaith! The Borscht Belt, which opened over the summer in new quarters in Newtown, cut the ribbon on a weekday-only branch there Monday, and the menu includes overstuffed sandwiches and New York bagels and shmear.

📮 Have a question about food in Philly? E-mail your questions to me at mklein@inquirer.com for a chance to be featured in my newsletter.

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Eat well, and be sure to watch for not one but two newsletters next week.