A few years ago, if you heard the words “breakfast pizza,” it meant cold, leftover slices from the night before. Last year, the term reportedly exploded to mean a pizza baked expressly for breakfast, usually with eggs and definitely involving bacon. According to Technomic's MenuMonitor, a food-industry consulting firm that tracks these kinds of things, breakfast pizza came out of nowhere to claim the top spot as the fastest-growing breakfast item in the U.S. Scrambled eggs was second. The trend, some say, will continue.
It was indeed last year that Domino's started to offer breakfast pizza in a few of its markets, making headlines and perhaps inspiring others to do the same. Über food blogger Smitten Kitchen published her own version this year.
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I first encountered a breakfast pizza last year at Pat & Oscars.
Here's what I thought about it back then:
“It was a good breakfast pizza. Admittedly, there was no previous benchmark I could measure it against. Still, the thing was much better than I expected. In fact, I ate two slices, though I only really needed one.
The eggs, the thing I was most skeptical about when I heard of its existence, were not overcooked. Nicely scrambled and still somewhat blubbery, they accounted for most of the thickness and were covered with a thin, insulating top layer of cheese. The pizza was so loaded with egg it was just a millimeter shy of being called a deep dish or, maybe, a quiche.
There was no sausage, unfortunately, but there was bacon–crispy, crackly shards sprinkled over the top like pork confetti. And beneath it all, the country gravy was spread out like it was red sauce, but without any of its oomph. It didn't need to be there at all and might as well have been omitted.
The sliced tomato and basil chiffonade was, in contrast, indispensable. It cut through the richness with a bright splash of fruit, refreshing acid and cleansing herb. The only thing that was missing to help it out was a bottle of Tabasco.”
But that was just one sighting. I've not seen breakfast pizza on any menu outside the one at Pat & Oscar's, and this was only at its Santa Ana branch. The Tustin store does not offer it. So I ask you, dear readers: Where else have you seen breakfast pizzas? Or is this so-called “trend” a figment of overactive imaginations?
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.