The state of the sit-down breakfast in Washington

“We’ll use our experience from that and spread it out across the country where it’s needed,” Francis says. “We’re competing with the Starbucks of the world, so we sort of have to meet that demand.”

Breakfast by location

(Deb Lindsey/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST) - Breakfast to go--coffee and an Egg McMuffin

More on this Story

• The state of breakfast in DC
• Complete list: Best places for a sit-down breakfast in DC
• Readers’ Picks: Tell us your favorite place for a morning meal
• RECIPE: Asian Crab and Rice Omelet

View all Items in this Story

• RECIPE: Carrot Cake Pancakes With Cream Cheese Sauce
• RECIPE: Spiced Baked Bananas
• RECIPE: Pecan-Chocolate-Espresso Coffee Cake

Despite the rise of grab-and-go morning meals, a few local restaurateurs are starting to venture into the breakfast market, hoping to capture either those eaters who still want a sit-down meal or those who want something fresher than a reheated sandwich. Michael Babin, co-owner of the Neighborhood Restaurant Group, has designs to open an eatery near Dupont Circle, an area that has shown a taste for breakfast. Likewise, when NRG opens its Red Apron Butchery shop in Penn Quarter this fall, chef-butcher Nathan Anda plans to roll out a breakfast menu that will offer both sit-down and takeaway options.

“There is a market for breakfast. There really always has been,” says Babin, whose other restaurants, from Birch & Barley to Evening Star Cafe, typically do not open until lunch. “It’s probably something that’s location dependent,” based on the density of office buildings.

Like Babin, Passion Food’s Tunks has shied away from breakfast service — until he opened Burger Tap & Shake on Washington Circle, where the confluence of business offices, George Washington University classrooms and residential units provided plenty of reasons to open for the first meal of the day. But to make the morning service manageable, and possibly profitable, Tunks devised a clever, chef-driven menu that doesn’t require a lot of extra labor: His line of “breakfast burgers” uses the same buns as his regular patties, while his “breakfast fries” merely require the prep team to add more cut spuds to its usual routine. He can run his whole breakfast program with three employees.

BTS’s breakfast burgers menu was launched in February, and its sales so far are fairly modest, ranging between 40 to 60 customers on most weekdays before swelling to 70 or more on Fridays. You could argue that those numbers underscore what Nestle suggested in the first place: Many may not feel hungry enough to fuel up first thing in the morning.

The science of human biology might drive some people’s breakfast decisions, but not those of Ann Cashion, the James Beard award-winning chef behind Johnny’s Half Shell, which caters to Capitol Hill power brokers most weekday mornings. When not working, Cashion loves meeting one of her close friends for breakfast, which carries little of the forced, low-light intimacy of dinner and the free flow of alcohol that can generate those feelings. She fondly recalls the breakfasts she’s enjoyed in New Orleans and San Francisco, cities not built on politics, power and cynicism.

Breakfast “just doesn’t seem to be part of the culture here,” Cashion says. “Maybe breakfast is driven by feeling connected. . . . I feel like New Orleans is a place where people feel connected, and San Francisco is the same way.”

Is Cashion suggesting that breakfast is too intimate for Washington, a town increasingly comfortable with fractiousness and extremes? She laughs and brings the question back to the personal level, where she draws a subtle comparison between the meal that Washington loves (dinner) and the one it apparently doesn’t (breakfast).

“I saw my friend over breakfast because it did seem more intimate in the sense of really catching up and really being present,” she says. “Maybe it’s kind of like the difference between morning light and candlelight.” True friends, in other words, don’t need a flickering ambiance to feel close. They can be intimate even over breakfast, a feast that appears to be turning into the most neglected meal of the day.

See the complete list of mini-reviews from the Food section and Weekend staff.

RECIPES:

Asian Crab and Rice Omelet

Carrot Cake Pancakes With Cream Cheese Sauce

Spiced Baked Bananas

Pecan-Chocolate-Espresso Coffee Cake