For five years, Mondays were our version of restaurant school.
From 2015 until the world shut down in 2020, Monday was our only day off from the restaurant. Most people would probably hear “day off” and imagine sleeping in, maybe having a long lunch, doing absolutely nothing.
We apparently had a very different definition.
We would take the first flight out of Miami in the morning, land in another city, eat absolutely everything we could fit into a single day, and take the last flight home that night.
New York. Chicago. New Orleans. Wherever there was something happening in food that we wanted to experience, we went.
And somehow, this is the part I really can’t explain, we’d land back in Miami late Monday night and be right back at the restaurant the next morning for French Onion Tuesday.
I don’t know where that energy came from. We sure weren’t teenagers but it felt like that singular teenage restlessness.
I wouldn’t trade those Mondays for anything.
I usually traveled with my husband and my two best friends, who also happened to be my general manager and executive chef. They had both been with me since the restaurant opened, so the four of us weren’t simply going out to eat together. We were experiencing restaurants together.
And there is a difference. We noticed everything.
Of course we tasted the food, but we were also watching the room. The lighting. The music. The plates. How we were greeted. How quickly the drinks arrived. What people at the next table ordered. How a dish was presented. What made us want another bite. What made a restaurant feel alive.
As chefs, we’d gone to culinary school. We’d learned technique and discipline and the foundations of cooking.
But this was a different kind of schooling. This was restaurant school. The kind where you learn by sitting in the dining room. And one morning in Brooklyn, the lesson was an egg sandwich.
I can still picture the four of us sitting around this thick, worn wooden table. The kind of table that had clearly held thousands of breakfasts before ours. Scratches and marks in the wood. Nothing precious about it.
Brooklyn was moving outside.
That particular New York morning energy was everywhere, the sound of people talking, doors opening and closing, coffee being poured, plates hitting tables. We had an entire day of eating mapped out ahead of us, so there was a strategy involved.
You can’t go too hard at the first stop. We ordered an egg sandwich for the table.
One sandwich. Four people. Just a taste. Because there were more restaurants waiting. Then it arrived.
A soft bun wrapped around warm egg custard-looking square, and gloriously melted American cheese. Nothing was trying too hard. There wasn’t a tweezer in sight. No precious garnish. No ingredient that needed a paragraph of explanation.
It was hot, soft, salty, creamy and deeply comforting. We cut it up. I took my bite. And I remember looking around the table.
You know that moment when you’re eating with people who understand food and nobody actually has to say anything?
That. We all knew. This thing was incredible… otherworldly really.
Suddenly our carefully planned strategy for eating our way through Brooklyn didn’t seem quite as important.
We ordered another one. That second sandwich might be my favorite part.
Four restaurant people who knew perfectly well that we had an entire day of reservations and food ahead of us, sitting around a beat-up wooden table saying, essentially:
Forget the plan. We need another.
There is something about that moment that has stayed with me all these years.
I’ve eaten extraordinarily elaborate food. I’ve been lucky enough to experience incredible restaurants all over the world. I’ve tasted dishes that required days of preparation and techniques that take years to master.
And yet I can close my eyes and still remember that egg sandwich in Brooklyn.
That’s one of the greatest lessons food has taught me.
Complexity doesn’t guarantee pleasure.
Sometimes the thing you remember forever is the simplest thing on the table. Eggs. American cheese. Bread. Mayonnaise.
But when the temperature is right, the textures are right, the seasoning is right and everything comes together in that one perfect bite?
Maximum Flavor.
My version is inspired by that morning, but I’ve adapted it for the way we actually cook at home.
I cut them into thick squares while they’re still warm and lay two slices of American cheese over each one so the cheese begins to melt into the eggs.
Then I spread Kewpie mayo over a sesame bun and put the whole beautiful thing together.
It’s humble food. It’s easy food. And it’s exactly the kind of food I love.
Because more than a decade after those Monday adventures began, I don’t remember every fancy plate we ate or every restaurant we visited.
But I remember that table. I remember the four of us sitting around it.
I remember knowing we had a full day of eating ahead of us and ordering that second sandwich anyway.
And most of all, I remember that first bite. Sometimes that’s the best restaurant school there is.
