The breakfast that started the day...and started an obsession
The Cobble Hill Coffee Shop, 314 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY 11231
During the fall of 2008, the beloved Donut House retired to its cocoon and re-emerged as what is now known as Coffee Shop – The Cobble Hill Coffee Shop, that is. No title is more befitting for an eatery that embodies and delivers the sunny morning mellowness of this South Brooklyn neighborhood (Cobble Hill/Carroll Gardens).
Perhaps because the ownership remained consistent after the metamorphosis, the diner exudes authenticity and belonging. Perhaps the best way to compliment a business whose chief merit is a sense of normalcy is to benchmark it against core characteristics of any place that strives to provide that down home feeling that keeps us going back, cholesterol count be damned.
1. Standards
It seems obvious to do a rundown of what needs to be on a diner menu, but you’d be surprised how many places are missing what you crave.
That said, diners MUST have sweet (waffles, hotcakes, French toast, jam, marmalade, and maybe crepes) and savory (eggs, omelets, sausages, bacon, ham, home fries or tater tots, regular sliced bread instead of artisan stuff, a boat load of butter, and possibly poached eggs, hollandaise sauce, and lox) breakfast foods served at ALL HOURS. Lunch selections MUST include burgers, melts (especially tuna), clubs, and reubens. The Coffee Shop has all this and more (paninis, eggplant parmagiana, fish & chips, Greek stuff, liver, frank ‘n’ beans, and even salads for the self-conscious and delusional) available from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily. They take cards, too, so if the night before fleeced you of your cash, you won’t go hungry.
Few diners offer much more beyond uninspired omelettes, greasy pork products, and stock sandwiches with limp fries. The Coffee Shop surpasses run-of-the-mill diners with deli-level specialties and plain old favorites that are SO country that they are usually completely overlooked. I guess I’m talking about corned beef hash. Tell me one other place where they have this readily available in the city! It’s delicious, with the stupefying sodium content of the canned shit but the complex flavor and texture of real food.
Go here to see more of the takeout-able menu.
2. Beverages
All diners have coffee; drip all the way, often old and sludgy, but always with that special quality that calms you down and amps you up at the same time because you just have to go with what came out of the machine and it’s a thrill to lose control like that when you’re used to standing over Starbucks workersto make sure your espresso is made right. While this place is called the Coffee Shop, it’s the farthest thing from a caffeine boutique with its artsy cups of foam. In fact, I suspected that the single option coffee was Folgers, and it WAS the best part of waking up.
As for juice, normally, you’ll find a $5 half pint of OJ at some fancy ass place. It comes in an anal looking vial but tastes like it’s from concentrate, or straight out of a Continental Airlines cabin. Here, the worst case scenario is $3.50 for 10 to 16 ounces of orange juice, grapefruit juice, or even tomato in a big, friendly, beveled, kitchen style plastic cup. They even mixed grapefruit with orange for me. The last time I had that done by my own hand, or at some beatnik’s cafe in Berkeley, so it meant a lot to me. So forget the sodas squirting out of mechanical udders at other places. Here, the juice is what’s worth the squeeze.
3. Atmosphere
The best diners tend to be unpretentious in atmosphere, right down to its bitchy (Seinfeld’s soup nazi, a waitress in a diner in my hometown) or nurturing waitstaff. However, lots of diners are either downright dirty, taking the hole-in-the-wall aesthetic to the extreme. Or, they are unnaturally dolled up with inflated prices to match, piming some image like a shiny new product .
The Coffee Shop strikes the perfect balance in how a diner should appear and feel. It’s clean but not fancy, intimate but not gloomy, cozy but not cramped, lively but not loud, and fragrant but not odorous. The staff and benevolent owner are of the extremely friendly variety, and they’re not trying to get anything out of you in exchange for good service, either. True, assholes working at a local diner can sometimes wield their own brand of charm, let’s face it; it’s nicer to be greeted with a smile than to fight for street cred first thing on a weekend morning from a server who hates the world, and possibly you.
This is one of the top brunch places I’ve been to in my whole entire life. It’s where I had coffee AND orange-grapefruit juice AND ice water, bacon AND hash browns, two eggs sunny side up on a bed of homefries AND bites of a friend’s crispy waffles…essentially what you’d get in a real household when no one is too hungover or lazy to throw down and make everything at once, reaching across the table to sample one another’s dishes and refill multiple cups and mugs with big pours from pitchers of nectar.
The only dilemma is whether to get outrageously drunk the night before just to feel the full extent of the relief of eating here the morning after…or to stay sober in order to savor each unadulterated moment as you feast.
—Jia H. Jung
