The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Jake's

There is, for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, a vast proliferation of brunch spots here in the Valley. In addition to the expected handful of chrome-and-linoleum, dining-car diners (this is New England, after all), there are trendy cafes serving locally grown, organic food; sugar shacks where you can drizzle your food with made-right-there maple syrup; artsy-studenty coffee shops; and any number of kountry kitchens of the sort you'll find in small towns all over America, the kinds of places that presidential candidates like to pop into for photo-ops with real Americans, most of whom, in places like this, will be found wearing feed-lot ballcaps and hearing aids. I'm not sure how to account for this abundance of brunch options - maybe it has something to do with all the students, or all the parents visiting all the students, or the combination of lots of students and lots of old people gathered together in one place - but I'm happy to take advantage of it. Indeed, since I moved here at least half of the meals I've eaten outside the house have been of the breakfast/brunch variety. This is traceable to a number of causes, but the primary one, I believe, has to do with my tendency to get up quite early in the morning, and therefore to eat breakfast quite early. By the time 10:30 or 11:00 rolls around, breakfast is like four hours in the past, and I'm ready to eat again. And what does one eat at that time of day? You guessed it.

So by now I've been to quite a few of these places, but by no means have I exhausted the available options. I'm quite a thorough person, and I don't like to visit a place (or live in a place) without having explored its every corner, at least every corner in which something interesting or tasty might be going on. I also work well within a clearly defined set of parameters - set me free in a large grocery store and tell me to buy something, anything, to eat, and I'll wander around helpless for hours in the face of so many options, but tell me to find something for lunch that's yellow, starts with the letter m, and can be found anywhere between aisles 4 and 9, and I'll provide you with the most memorable meal you've ever had - so it helps me to have an organizing principle for my exploring. To that end, I've decided to scour all the brunch places in the Valley for The Perfect French Toast (TPFT). Why french toast? You mean, besides the fact that, when done right, it can be the most delicious breakfast food imaginable? Well, here are two more reasons.

1) It's hard to get right. Most breakfast foods are pretty much the same wherever you go. Scrambled eggs are, with very few exceptions, scrambled eggs. Ditto bacon, sausage links, even waffles and pancakes (with some caveats - see #2 below). With french toast, however, there are a number of variables - involving quality and quantity of ingredients, timing, and so forth - that make it both more difficult to execute properly and more rewarding when done right. How a restaurant does its french toast is usually a pretty good measure of the care and skill with which it executes the rest of its menu.

2) French toast is less susceptible to culinary variations or innovations. Unlike pancakes, say, into which cooks will stuff all sorts of things, from apples to pumpkin to granola, or waffles, which can come in all sorts of different fruity flavors, french toast usually appears in a consistent style from restaurant to restaurant. This makes it easier to compare different restaurants. If I were to order the potato pancakes at one place and the pumpkin pancakes at another, I would have insufficient data with which to form a solid judgment of the two restaurants' pancakes. It would be like comparing apples to oranges, or, in this case, potatoes to pumpkins. Mind you, there are a few substantial variations that I expect to encounter in my search for TPFT - most of which will have to do with the type of bread used - but these variations will be minimal, and I'll do my best to ensure that the search is conducted on a level playing field. That includes refusing to garnish my french toast with different sorts of fruit, an option many places include, for, as much as it kills me to do so, fruit is the sort of variable that could skew the whole project. Syrup variation, on the other hand, I regard as a legitimate point of comparison.

So with these notions in mind, I set out this morning to begin the search. I went to Jake's.



Jake's prides itself on its "no frills" dining ethos, and to a certain extent I agree with their self-assessment. The food is cheap, standard fare - no tofu sausage or spinach wraps here, just eggs and breakfast meat, waffles and pancakes, french toast (with or without meat, eggs, or fruit), and an occasional modest flourish like huevos rancheros or their daily specials. The servers are black-aproned and all female, the cooks, whom you can glimpse over a partition behind the cash register, are tattooed, surly looking, and male, like cooks are supposed to be. The coffee is served from diner-style coffee pots and it tastes like diner coffee - weak, but most amenable to plenty of milk or cream - and is refilled frequently, provided the servers are paying attention to you. There's a counter with stools for solo diners and scarred wooden tables for larger parties, dark wood-panelled walls, and to get to the bathroom you have to go down a dank set of stairs while trying not to hit your head on overhead beams and pipes. That said, there are at least a few frills to be found at Jake's, most notably the black-and-white portrait of Calvin Coolidge hanging above the counter, as well as a hand-painted portrait of the Quaker from the front of the Quaker Oats cartons. These are frills by pretty much anyone's definition.

The nice thing about Jake's is that you can almost always get a seat there without waiting. Other, trendier spots in town often have large crowds gathered outside their doors, especially on weekends, and at least one of them (Sylvester's) actually prides itself on its notoriously long waits, much as Jake's prides itself on its lack of frills. This morning was a typically mellow scene at Jake's, the only real excitement coming from a group of four local businessmen and politicians who'd gathered to gossip about real estate and the perilous state of the corporate franchises in the area. Home Depot in West Springfield, I gather, is not doing nearly as well as it was when it opened, while the strip mall that houses Old Navy and a now-defunct Linens 'N Things is in pretty dire straits. Things, it was agreed, will probably get worse before they get better.

Anyway - the french toast. I decided to inaugurate this search for TPFT at Jake's because, way back in September, I'd had an order of french toast there that completely blew me away. It was crisp, hearty yet flavorful, unlike any french toast I'd ever had. In the several times I've been there since, however, the french toast has never come close to that initial taste of heaven - it's been soggy, under- and unevenly cooked, and fell apart easily under the weight of the syrup. It was quite depressing, actually, and illustrative of my earlier point that french toast can be transplendent when done right, but very difficult actually to get right.

This time the french toast was... pretty good. It was evenly cooked on both sides, with a nicely browned shell that gave a tiny snap when I bit into it. The bread - which, I suspect, was simply store-bought white bread - held the butter and syrup well, without getting soggy or mushy in the middle (the soggy, mushy middle is the most common lapse one encounters while eating french toast). The butter was light and whipped, but the syrup wasn't "pure" maple syrup - for that you had to pay extra, and I didn't want to pay extra - but simply supermarket "maple-flavored" syrup, and so less than memorable. It was, in short, a solid but by no means exciting french toast experience, a good baseline, perhaps, for future excursions. It looked like this: