We Got Plenty of Muffin
At These B& Bs, It's More About the Breakfast Than the Bed
Wednesday, December 6, 2006; Page C02
Just as our noses sadly desensitized to the comforting smell of the chocolate espresso muffins cooling on the stove, a new scent joined the mix: a French lemon tart baking in the kitchen of the Chesapeake Wood Duck Inn on Tilghman Island, Md. This was a place of serious food.
A short time later, four of us sat at the dining table wondering whether to dip into the muffin basket right away or be good boys and girls and finish our fruit first. It was, after all, a pretty tasty fruit salad: grapes and blueberries with snap, and out-of-season strawberries and watermelon with surprising summer freshness, topped with a dollop of key lime yogurt dressing.
  It's not just Cheerios at the Wood Duck Inn on Tilghman Island, one of several area B& Bs where breakfast is a big deal. (Photos Provided By Chesapeake Wood Duck Inn) 
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But the star of the day was co-innkeeper and chef Jeffrey Bushey's signature breakfast dish -- the Tilghman Island egg puff. It's a seemingly delicate but wholly hearty puff pastry-wrapped entree filled with fluffy eggs, leeks, prosciutto, asiago cheese and other ingredients. A raspberry coulis and a key lime mustard sauce zigzagged across the plate, with fresh asparagus adding a burst of color.
Breakfasts like this are half the appeal of going to a bed-and-breakfast, yet too many inns serve an ordinary meal -- store-bought croissants, a quick omelet or maybe the ubiquitous and easy banana-stuffed French toast.
"If you're going to take the time to go away, then you're not looking for the cereal that you grab on the run at home," says self-taught chef and innkeeper Jan Garrabrant of the Artist's Inn and Gallery near Lancaster, Pa. "You want to take your time and relax and be served."
The best brunches are found at B&Bs run by foodies and professional chefs, and there are several in the Washington area that serve high-end, gourmet breakfasts. Bushey worked as a chef at Washington hotels and restaurants before he and his wife, Kimberly, bought the Wood Duck Inn seven years ago. The coffee table in the sunroom is overflowing with food and travel magazines. The renovated kitchen suits the chef's needs in preparing meals for up to 14 people -- the inn has seven double rooms -- and has a suitable amount of whimsy in its lunchbox collection and mini-rolling pin and coffee mug knobs on the cabinets.
The inn sits midway down a small residential lane not far from the island drawbridge. Tilghman is a small, nothing-to-do idyll close to, but blessedly removed from, the tourist hub of St. Michaels (with its Christmas-themed stores, antique shops and catch-of-the-day bistros). But that's the appeal of the Wood Duck Inn -- doing little but sitting in the warm sunroom or on an Adirondack chair out back, watching the watermen pull out each morning . . . and waiting for breakfast.
1. The Chesapeake Wood Duck Inn, Gibsontown Road at Dogwood Harbor, Tilghman Island, Md., 800-956-2070, http:/
Four More Foodie Inns
If you're a food enthusiast, here are some nearby B&Bs where breakfast is a big deal (and included in the room rate).
2. INN AT MEANDER PLANTATION, LOCUST DALE, VA.
The breakfast: Owner and chef Suzie Blanchard's breakfast philosophy is simple: Serve familiar dishes with a twist. "We love good food, but we don't like it to be so far out there that you don't recognize it," she says. The three-course meal includes roasted vegetables adorning polenta squares with poached eggs, and heritage apples dressing up pumpkin-spiced waffles. And most of the herbs come from the inn's garden, so large that it includes 14 varieties of mint alone.
The place: The stately white plantation house, with its six front columns and formal boxwood gardens, dates to 1766; Thomas Jefferson frequently hung out in the parlor, which faces the Blue Ridge Mountains. Blanchard also runs an on-site cooking school.
