The Search for the Perfect French Toast - Esselon Cafe

I knew this would happen eventually.

It's been about a month and a half since I initiated my search for The Perfect French Toast, during which time I've had eight different french toasts (nine, if you count the Memphis French Toast in Oklahoma City) and reported the experiences to you as diligently and entertainingly as I could. And now the inevitable has begun to happen: I'm running out of ways to write about french toast. This is not at all the same as saying that I'm growing tired of french toast - quite the contrary! - but it is to say that there are only so many adjectives you can use to describe french toast, only so many variables you can isolate in how it's prepared and presented, only so many hyperbolic superlatives you can employ before your readers start to grow testy and suspicious.

It is also becoming clear to me that I'm using this french toast quest as a narrative crutch. (I just did a quick Google search and confirmed that I am the only person on the internet ever to have written those words.) That's a roundabout way of saying that it's making me lazy. Back before this whole thing started, I'd spend many of my waking hours on the alert for something to blog about - several times a week I'd come across something and think, "Ooh! I must blog about that!" and then proceed either to do just that, or to forget about it as soon as I got home. Lately, though, I've been retracting my antennae, blithely and inattentively moving through life in the smug assurance that the next blog post would probably be about french toast, as would the one after that, and the one after that. Sure, I've interspersed some non-toast posts in amongst the others, but just think of all the fantastic, earth-shattering things I've experienced and decided not to blog about, or, worse, failed to experience altogether, so wrapped up have I been in this french toast thing. The mind boggles! (bloggles?)

Does all this mean I'm abandoning the search for TPFT before it's reached its natural end? Absolutely not! Does it mean I've accepted that the best french toast I've had so far - the challah french toast at the Lone Wolf - is, indeed, the perfect french toast? Not on your life! Does it mean I simply don't have a lot to say about my most recent french toast excursion and have decided to pad this post with some verbose, slightly tongue-in-cheek introspection? You might be onto something there.

The Esselon Cafe sits out on my favorite, love-to-hate-it highway: Route 9, between NoHo and Amherst. It's in a standalone building on the Hadley Common, a pleasant ribbon of land that cuts perpendicularly across the highway and is lined with modest but stately old homes whose leafy trees look stunning in autumn and will probably look quite pretty in the spring, if spring ever arrives. The cafe itself is a family-friendly place that looks like an antique, slightly overgrown Starbucks (you order at the counter, the servers are hemmed in on all sides by hulking and hopelessly complex coffee-making contraptions, the color palate is all muted, soothing earth tones). They've got a covered porch with tables and chairs, an uncovered porch with a few picnic tables and a hammock out on the lawn, and a carved (or possibly cast-iron) ceiling that reminds me of the ornate ceiling at the Crown Liquor Saloon in Belfast, a gorgeous early-Victorian pub that's owned by the National Trust and whose west-facing windows have the misfortune of facing the Europa Hotel, at one time the most-bombed hotel in Europe. I didn't have my great big camera with me, so I was forced to use my BlackBerry instead - these pictures aren't great, but you'll get the idea:





Esselon's french toast, like that at the Lone Wolf and the Green Bean, is made with challah bread, and it can be ordered with fruit or without. Kate was with me and, as we had done at Amanouz, she ordered the fruit while I did my Gandhi imitation and went for the bare-bones version. It came out all covered in powdered sugar and served with real maple syrup - hers with strawberries and blueberries on top, mine with a single red strawberry and a green mint leaf. Both of them were tasty and sweet, and, though the bread was just the slightest bit chewy, they easily entered the top ranks of french toast in the Valley, if not quite coming up to the level of near-perfection achieved by the Lone Wolf.

And that, as they say, is that.