The Best Corned Beef Hash and Eggs Breakfast In America Project

In one of his more recent posts, The Sort of Stuff You Think About, Mr. Schprock made reference to one of his earlier posts, to which he provided a link, about his Saturday morning breakfast spot, thus making me read TWO of his posts for a full understanding.

But, at risk of appearing as though I can’t formulate an original thought, his earlier post about his favorite breakfast spot got me to thinking about my favorite breakfast spot.

During my brief tenure at a previous job, coworkers of mine acquainted me with a small diner about a half-block from our office building. Mac’s restaurant is a narrow, rectangular space in a small, one-story, commercial tenant building of narrow, rectangular spaces. My colleagues of the time had brought me there for lunch that one day, but they normally chose local fast-food restaurants for lunch-time jaunts, so we went to Mac’s together only once. As a mass-transit commuter, I sometimes had the good fortune to catch a bus within seconds of arriving at the stop, and then arriving at the train platform as a train pulled into the stop, which allowed me as much as 20 minutes of extra time when I got off the train at my destination. Being a big breakfast fan (and I mean “big breakfast fan” in all three possible meanings), and relegated to foot travel, I decided to drop in on the people at Mac’s to see what kind of breakfast they could do me.

Mac’s is your typical “greasy spoon” type of diner. You enter the building on the southwest corner and find yourself facing the south end – “the smoking section” – of the straight counter, and between the long row and the short row of booths juxtaposed at a right angle to each other, with a break at the corner entrance. The counter seats twelve patrons, six at each half of the counter on either side of a break in the middle to accommodate the waitresses as they work. That first morning at Mac’s was a cold, Chicago winter day, and as I entered I saw a sign that read something to the effect of, “As a courtesy to all of our customers, lone patrons please sit at the counter during peak business hours.” There were several booths open. “The smoking section” was full, which suited me just fine. There was an available stool at the north end of the north counter, way at the back of the dining room, with the adjacent stool also empty, so I wouldn’t have to sit immediately next to another patron. As I sat I was warmed by the heat collecting over and around the large griddle directly in front of me across the counter and against the east wall, where the lead cook, a stocky, 30s-ish Mexican man worked at a feverish pace. The waitress for my section approached from the business side of the counter brandishing a full, glass Bunn coffee pot and said, “Morning. Coffee?”

“Certainly,” I said as I turned my coffee cup upright in its saucer. The waitress handed me the menu and my eyes stopped on “Corned Beef Hash and Eggs.” I don’t know when I started liking corned beef hash, but I do. I seem to recall that the first time I ever ordered it was because it sounded good. And it was. So I decided to try Mac’s version of corned beef hash and eggs.

And so it went for the next year or so, stopping in once every week or two and, having approved heartily of Mac’s rendition on that first cold morning, breaking fast on corned beef hash and eggs, over medium, with a side of home-fried potatoes, and toast.

As time went on I learned that the owner of the place is not named Mac, nor does anyone named Mac even work there. It seems that Mac sold his old diner to Perry, a young son of a Greek immigrant. I’m sure it’s Perinakos or some really thick-sounding Greek name, but he introduced himself as Perry. I learned that Perry employs his father, whom I know by no name other than “Pop,” in the kitchen. I learned that the highly-efficient lead cook is named Joe. He speaks with a fairly strong Spanish accent, but instead of José, he introduces himself as Joe. He emigrated here from the Michoacan region of Mexico. He learned my name within a few visits, and within a few visits more he understood that, with only rare variation, my breakfast is corned beef hash and eggs, over medium, a side of potatoes, and toast. I learned that Joe has Mondays off, and on Mondays Perry cooks. I learned that breakfast is always, always, ALWAYS served to you within two minutes of ordering, but it goes all the way up to three minutes when they’re really busy. I learned that the best place to sit at Mac’s Diner is at the far north end of the counter, at the back of the dining room, because Joe knows me and my “usual,” starts cooking my breakfast before the waitress takes my order, and serves it directly to me when it’s ready. On top of that, it’s nice and toasty warm back there, away from the entrance, on a cold and windy winter morning. And I learned that “the smoking section” is a figurative term because the place is so small that, if “the smoking section” is full, and everyone in it is smoking, no matter where I sit at Mac's, I might as well be sitting in “the smoking section.”

Not much later I quit my job at the place half a block from Mac’s Diner, but, to my good fortune, my current place of employment has me driving right past my old place of employment and, subsequently, Mac’s Diner, so, though not as frequently as when it was a three-minute walk away, I still stop in occasionally for a morning bite.

With the new job came a lot of travel, a lot of stays in hotels in a wide assortment of cities. In many of these places I tried the locals' corned beef hash and eggs, only to be disappointed. I also made my first attempt at losing the extra weight I had put on from all that traveling and eating restaurant food. So my corned beef hash and eggs order at Mac’s changed slightly to include only a half order of potatoes (and it’s still a lot of potatoes!), and rye toast, which, I discovered the first time I ordered it, I like better than wheat or white.

My epicurean exploits across the country have inspired me to initiate an experiment, which I call The Best Corned Beef Hash and Eggs Breakfast In America Project. See, it’s not just about the best corned beef hash. It’s about the whole plate. I hate when a restaurant serves the eggs on top of the corned beef hash. Yes, I know that there are little chunks of potato in the corned beef hash, but there has to be a pile of home fries or hash browns with it, whether as part of the dish or ordered on the side. And it’s nothing without toast. I like my eggs “dunky.” Call it the last hold-out of my childhood habits, but I have to be able to “dunk” the toast in the semi-cooked egg yolk or I might as well just have a bowl of Cheerios. Once the yolks have been “dunked” out, I then use the fork, tines flat against the plate, to finely chop the egg white, just like my mother used to do. Yeah. That’s it. It’s a paean to my dear departed mother, so don’t make any smart-ass comments about my dunky-choppy eggs! And then I mix the chopped eggs, potatoes and corned beef hash all into one big pile of hash to scoop up by the forkful and eat with a bite of toast. YUM!

Some places have served me homemade corned beef hash, with succulent chunks of meat cut from a side of corned beef and mixed with potatoes and some kind of spices. It was quite impressive and really quite flavorful. But the strong flavor of the corned beef has to be tempered by the other ingredients in the hash. They didn’t do that. And they screwed up by having some new-age presentation of the eggs, poor preparation of the potatoes, and the corned beef got stuck in my teeth. ‘A’ for effort, ‘D’ for execution. Other places seem to think that any old corned beef hash from a can will suffice. It doesn’t. Grade = ‘F’.

The Best Corned Beef Hash and Eggs Breakfast In America Project is far from scientific. Sometimes on the road my interest in just having a decent breakfast steers me away from the chance that the corned beef hash will suck, thus disappointing me and making me wish I had ordered the country fried steak and eggs. So sometimes I opt for that. Or the stack o’ pancakes. Or the Cheerios. Thus far in my experience, there is yet to be found in the USA a corned beef hash and eggs breakfast to rival that at Mac’s Diner.

So, my dear readers …all three of you… if you’re ever traveling on I-90 to or through the near northwest suburbs of Chicago, near O’Hare airport, and you happen to find yourself at the corner of Cumberland Avenue and Higgins Road, look to the northeast corner of the intersection, at the first building on Higgins, just east of the gas station. It won’t take you long to find the current home of The Best Corned Beef Hash and Eggs Breakfast In America, Mac’s Diner. And if you decide to stop in, look over to the customer seated in the last counter stool at the back of the dining room. If it’s the right time of day and he’s 40ish, balding and, fatting(?), and he’s polishing off a corned beef hash and eggs breakfast, he just might be me!

Note: A law passed recently in Illinois now bans smoking in public establishments, so there is no longer a smoking section in Mac's. Or anywhere, for that matter!
-2 January 2011


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