Shell Game
THE BROKEN EGG CAFE has left the Northshore littered with satisfied breakfast diners.
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Ron Green's cocky rooster might soon leave broken eggs strewn all over the Gulf Coast.
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WHAT: The Broken Egg Cafe
CUISNE: Breakfast, brunch and lunch
WHEN: Breakfast and lunch Tuesday through Sunday
WHERE: 200 Gerard St., Mandeville, (504) 624-3388
CARDS: Major
I break about 1,600 eggs a week," says Ron Green, owner and manager of his
aptly named breakfast eatery, the Broken Egg Cafe. Such large-scale destruction
inspired Green's concept for his restaurant's logo, a rooster standing on the
shattered shells of his own offspring. "I wanted a real cocky rooster, who
looks like he accidentally stepped on his own eggs," says Green. "I don't know
where that idea came from exactly, but you know how males are."
Hungry travelers from New Orleans arrive at the Broken Egg Cafe by
crossing the Causeway, taking a sharp right turn and following the narrow
turning road through piney woods until eventually reaching Mandeville's Gerard
Street, where antique shops cluster. Another right turn toward the lake brings
you to the 80-year-old house of barge board and heart pine that Green began to
renovate in 1994 and then opened as a restaurant in 1996. A graveled, manicured
parking lot across the street and a goldfish pond in front complete the
cultivated, rustic picture.
Inside the house are exposed brick, terra cotta walls decorated
with copper posts, murals of sea oaks dripping with Spanish moss, and matching
checkered curtains and tablecloths. Green lived in the house during the two
years it took him to do the renovation with his own hands. "It was mostly
intact, but it needed to be brought back to life." He then lived in the
upstairs during the restaurant's first year of operation. Such sweat equity
leaves him more than just strongly attached to his business. "I've had people
ask me if they can put their table in the ladies room because they love that
room. It's so spacious and purple and pretty," reports Green. "Now, I'm proud
that people recognize that."
Green has not always focused his professional judgment on what
shade of purple to paint the ladies room. Before the Broken Egg Cafe, he had
been redesigning launch pads at Cape Canaveral in Florida, and most recently
was a facility designer for the Department of Energy, working on a
superconducting super collider facility in Hammond. Budget cuts in 1994
required the doors of that facility to close; after 25 years in the field, he
considered other possibilities. "I had what I like to call a mid-life clarity,"
he explains. "Not a crisis, but a clarity."
The epiphany came when Green looked around his town and realized
that he did not have any of what he refers to as "high-end" breakfast options.
So he wrote five letters to breakfast restaurants in San Diego that he had
admired and asked the owners if they would teach him how to run a business like
theirs. Three positive responses came back, one from the Broken Yolk and
another from the Good Egg. Green purchased the rights to the menu from the Good
Egg and then combined the two names for his own place. Since he opened in 1996,
Green has regionalized the original menu. Now he offers such omelettes as the
Grand Isle, featuring shrimp ($8.45); the Mardi Gras, filled with crawfish
($8.45); Lafitte's tortilla -- scrambled eggs, chorizo, green chilies and
onions ($7.75); and an egg-smothered croissant with broccoli, tomatoes and mild
green chilies, called the Pontchartrain ($7.25).
Although Green had to leave town to learn the multitude of exotic
things that can be served with scrambled eggs, he has enhanced the
Californian's vast array of egg-related creations with the Louisianian's
favorite: banana's Foster ($6.95), which his menu declares "a bona fide humming
experience!" One noteworthy item that might go overlooked due to its modest
placement in the lower left-hand corner of the menu is the blackberry grits
($1.95). This is a warmed blackberry compote poured over your classic, creamy,
bland, slightly lumpy and profoundly comforting grits. It is, in fact, the
nicest thing anyone has ever done to grits, and you'll never find that on a
menu in San Diego, where grits are something you scrape off your headlights.
The high-end breakfast business has been so good that Green has
opened two other Broken Egg Cafes, one in Destin, Fla., and the other in nearby
Covington. But he still shares partnership for this concept with the original
company in California. "When are you going to open another Broken Egg?" is a
frequent question. The answer is that Green is in the process of trademarking
the name Another Broken Egg, which he would wholly own and be free to
franchise. Word has spread, it seems, and Green claims to have received more
than 70 requests from restaurateurs all over the country to purchase a
franchise of Another Broken Egg. This flare-up of interest in his concept
leaves Green modestly reviewing the map and his place in it.
"I plan to open everywhere from all the way up to Montgomery,
Alabama, down to Boca Raton, Florida," he announces of his long-term business
plan. "My goal is to litter the Gulf Coast with broken eggs."
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