The breakfast club

Sometimes it’s difficult to decide what to order at a restaurant. That’s especially true of places that offer multiple menus. Harry’s Cafe in Midtown is one such spot. It boasts one menu for breakfast and another menu with general Chinese and Vietnamese meals.

Even harder: trying to evaluate the quality of a restaurant where it’s near impossible to sample one of everything. So when a server handed my dining partner and me a breakfast menu on a recent weekday morning, we decided to just start there. There was another confusing twist, though: The breakfast menu has a subcategory for “Asian Breakfast,” which features Hawaiian favorites such as Spam and loco moco (rice topped with hamburger patties, eggs and gravy).We decided to order both an American-style breakfast plate (a waffle with two eggs and bacon), and an Asian one (fried rice with two eggs and sausage).

The portions here are huge, especially the heaping plateful of fried rice, which has a playful texture.

To get started, we needed to first crack the yolks of two over-easy eggs sitting atop the rice, which added saltiness and moistness to the crisp fried rice beneath. The whole plateful of food exuded the smokey wok flavor that often comes from stir-fried Chinese dishes cooked at extremely high heats. The Belgium-style waffle seemed overly fluffy, but the eggs (also ordered over-easy) were cooked to perfection and the bacon crisp. Still, the more memorable dish here is the fried rice.

On a subsequent visit, we sampled two more items from the “Asian Breakfast” list: a fried pork chop and the House Breakfast (a ground beef and veggie stir-fry with rice and eggs). The fried pork chop was served tender on the inside and crispy on the outside, with a simple but powerful salt-and-pepper seasoning. The House Breakfast, with its combination of veggies (cabbage, onions, carrots), tasted much healthier, but also plainer.

Later, we moved on to the Chinese food menu. A takeout order of stir-fried green beans, hot and sour soup, beef chow fun in black bean sauce and ginger beef was ready just minutes after a phone call. The soup was still piping hot when it arrived at home. Tangy, spicy and slightly salty, this is a nice way to heat up the belly on a cold night, even if the bamboo flavor might seem a tad overpowering for the uninitiated. The green-bean dish was also tasty, but could’ve used even more pickled veggies instead of onions for a more interesting flavor.

Of the two beef dishes, the ginger beef over rice is the better option. It contains huge slices of ginger, copious stir-fried veggies and tender slices of well-peppered beef. Though the beef chow fun in black bean sauce came with fluffy, wide chow fun noodles, there just wasn’t quite enough black bean sauce to coat the noodles and beef, and it ended up needing some extra sriracha and hoisin sauce.

Because SN&R readers voted Harry’s Cafe into the No. 3 spot for “Best Pho” this year, we also were curious to sample that. The bowl of Vietnamese soup came out piping hot, with fresh herbs, lime wedges and bean sprouts on a small side plate. It had a rich, dark beefy broth with thin slices of beef and beef meatballs. Aside from all that beefiness though, this dish just doesn’t quite have the diversity of other flavors (star anise, onion, marrow or otherwise) to put it on par with the great pho joints of Stockton Boulevard.

Harry’s Cafe does many things fairly well: American breakfasts, Chinese food and Vietnamese food. It offers prompt and kind service, quick takeout and it’s a good value for the money. But where it excels—and whats sets it apart from other places in town—are its Asian breakfast plates.