...and, consequently, the name of a
Chicago restaurant with a huge plastic piece of illuminated toasted bread spinning outside its front door. This is one of many in a like-minded theme of trendy, cute little slightly overpriced breakfast restaurants that serve really good food. Others like it are the
Bongo Room,
Kaliedoscope and
Spice.
All of these have basically the same limitted menu of great entrees, providing a few choices from each of your basic breakfast realms: pancakes/french toast, delectible egg dishes, healthy granola type stuff and a few Mexican huevos burritos concoctions.
Although our Bucktown friends seem to love Toast and recommend it constantly, Mike and I, who consider ourselves great conosseurs (sp?) of the Chicago dining scene, disagree.
While the potatoes at Toast are exquisite and dishes like the '
pancake orgy' (3 different kinds of cool fruity combination pancakes topped with yogurt, granola and honey) make for interesting choices, we much prefer the other restaurants in this category that I listed above.
The ambience at Toast is kind of cramped and cell-like (and I mean the jail variety, not the biological type.) While the teeny tables are overcrowded with
fru-fru items like strangely packaged brown sugar and 7 kinds of marmalade, the staff look at you like you're nuts if you request age-old
standard condiments like ketchup or
tabasco sauce.
There is always a long wait if you go in with more than 2 people and their
eggs florentine leave alot to be desired. And, if I wanted a place to go nuts with chorizo I would eat at
Hollywood Grill.