Below is the text of my monthly “Editor’s Letter” in the new issue of Washingtonian.
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Growing up in Vermont, I learned to take breakfast—and particularly maple syrup—seriously. Cold, dark winters, which could reach from Halloween past Easter, all but required hearty breakfasts and encouraged warm, convivial family meals.
Maple syrup was never just something on the supermarket shelf. Growing up, I mostly ate syrup from the maple trees on my grandparents’ farm, which a neighboring farmer tapped in the spring to collect sap. At a friend’s family’s sugar bush, where they still used the traditional metal buckets, I spent spring mornings in elementary school tramping through waist-deep snow to gather the sap and dump the heavy buckets into the horse-drawn collection sled. One spring, my parents tapped the maple tree in our back yard to make our own syrup in the kitchen—the evaporation filling the house with moisture after months of dry winter air.
You have to boil down 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, and most trees give off less than half that during those first weeks of spring when the sap runs—so our back-yard collection was more for fun than a significant contribution to the Graff family syrup supply.
In any event, breakfast was never just about the syrup. It was about getting the day under way, about sharing time and conversation with family, and relaxing on weekends as my father and sister scrambled eggs, cooked bacon, and flipped pancakes.
Today I tend to judge how seriously a restaurant takes breakfast mostly by whether it serves real maple syrup (although in Washington I’ve sometimes had to settle for Canadian or even—gasp—New Hampshire syrup).
This month we’re presenting our first-ever breakfast-and-brunch package. While I can’t guarantee you’ll find Vermont maple syrup on every menu, the 50-plus places—from delicious greasy spoons to Asian dim sum spots—all take the morning meal seriously. Some have a lot of fun along the way, such as the drag brunch at Perrys or the gospel brunch at the newly restored Howard Theatre.
In Washington, a city that seems to take everything seriously, breakfast is no exception. Brunch is one of the most popular searches on our website because, frankly, there aren’t enough places to meet the weekend demand—it often seems that the hardest reservation to get isn’t Friday or Saturday dinner but Sunday brunch. During the week, type-A lobbyists and politicians can be seen pacing up and down 15th Street at 7:25 am, checking their BlackBerrys and waiting for the Old Ebbitt Grill to open. The crowds at the Hay-Adams, the Four Seasons, or Tysons Corner’s Tower Club, meanwhile, tend to use breakfast as a verb rather than a noun and go as much to meet as to eat.
I’m still a champion of breakfast. At the holidays, I give colleagues bottles of Vermont maple syrup made by our family friend Craig Line. A good syrup is like a great bottle of Burgundy wine or Islay Scotch—enjoying it should be a group activity. It’s not meant to be rushed. It’s meant to encourage relaxation and conversation.
My regular “work” breakfast spot is Founding Farmers, featured on page 91. My weekday order: fresh orange juice and a dish called Drag Through the Garden, with fruit, English muffin, and extra jam. But if I’ve got time to linger and it’s cold outside, nothing beats Founding Farmers’ enormous trio of blueberry pancakes. Just make sure to order extra syrup—they never serve enough.
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