Brunch: Rewarding!

     Public Greens continues to impress me.  As the main funding source for the charitable Patachou Foundation, they could have been a perfunctory effort -- instead, they continue to offer an outstanding menu, items you simply cannot find elsewhere, prepared and served at a level far above the usual.  Take Monday brunch as an example:

Tamara Keel photo

     Starting on the far side, that's a pork barbecue sandwich -- with falling-apart slow-roasted pork, remarkable strawberry chipotle sauce, shredded cabbage, scallions and pickled green tomatoes, a huge amount of food overwhelming a fresh-baked focaccia bun easily eight inches square; the menu warned, "knife and fork required," and it wasn't hyperbole.  (In fact, my one complaint was that I needed a sharper knife.  Focaccia bread has a lovely, chewy crust and you're not getting through it easily with a standard table knife.)  That sandwich could have easily fed four people.  -- I managed to stand in for at least three of them.

     Off to the left, two (of the original three) fried green tomatoes, coated in a wonderful light batter and on a chive remoulade with some kind of tasty little sprouts on top -- not simply hard-to-find fried green tomatoes (which you about have to grow your own for, try'n buy green ones at the store these days: you can't) but remarkable, wonderful, glorious explosions for Springtime flavor!  Tam took the photo after tasting half of the first one and realizing they needed to be shot right now, before we gobbled them up.

     Foreground, chicken fingers, which are to ordinary chicken fingers what Norman Rockwell paintings are to family snapshots -- yes, that good, that much of an idealization of an old favorite. 

     After a long early-morning shift, in which I fought to stay awake and drove home forcing myself to keep my eyes in motion at all times, it was a welcome reward.  I went home and slept as contentedly as the cats I woke up sharing the bed with.