Name: Frenchie Restaurant
Address: Gedempte Oude Gracht 46, Haarlem, 2011 GS, NL
Telephone: 023 737 0618
Price range: €€
Rating: 3.9

Netherlands

Haarlem

Frenchie Restaurant

The breakfast sandwich is the American morning handheld: a fried or folded egg, a slice of melting cheese and a cooked meat, usually bacon, sausage or ham, pressed into a roll, bagel, English muffin or biscuit and eaten on the way to work. Its reference form is the New York deli bacon-egg-and-cheese on a kaiser roll, ordered with "salt, pepper, ketchup" and wrapped in foil, and its mass-market form is the Egg McMuffin that McDonald's introduced in 1972, a round egg cooked in a ring on a toasted English muffin with Canadian bacon and American cheese. The sausage-egg-and-cheese biscuit of the American South is a third branch, built on a tall buttermilk biscuit instead of bread. Since the 2010s a bakery and café version has grown up around it, with brioche buns, thick-cut bacon, aged cheddar and hot sauce, and the price has grown with it.

The egg decides the sandwich. The deli version is fried hard or scrambled on a flat-top and folded to the size of the roll so it does not spill; the drive-through version is cooked in a ring so it stays round and yolk-intact; the café version is often a soft-scrambled or sunny-side egg with a runny yolk, which eats better but travels badly. Cheese goes on the egg while it is still on the griddle so it melts from below, and the meat is cooked separately and set on top. The bread is toasted or griddled in butter or bacon fat, and the whole thing is assembled hot and pressed for a few seconds so it holds together. The ratio matters: one egg, one slice of cheese and two or three slices of bacon to a roll of about ten centimetres, with the bread thin enough that the fillings are more than half the bite.

Pick it up and judge it in the hand before you bite: it should be warm all the way through, hold together without a wrapper, and show the cheese melted into the egg rather than sitting on it as a cold square. The egg should be seasoned and not rubbery, the bacon crisp or the sausage browned, and the bread soft inside with a toasted face against the fillings. Mark down an egg that is a dry, grey disc or a wet unseasoned pile, unmelted cheese, bread that is cold or has gone soggy under a steaming egg, a roll so thick the fillings vanish, meat that is pale and limp, and any sandwich that has been held under a lamp, which shows as a sweating foil wrapper and a gummy bun. Hash browns tucked inside are a legitimate New York variant and not a fault; a sandwich that needs a knife is.

Breakfast Sandwich

South Korea

Korean Fried Chicken, also known as 'Yangnyeom Chicken' when coated with sauce, is a popular Korean dish made by deep-frying chicken pieces twice to achieve an extra crispy texture. Unlike Western fried chicken, it is typically seasoned with a sweet, spicy, and savory sauce made from gochujang (Korean red chili paste), garlic, soy sauce, sugar, and other ingredients. This dish gained popularity in South Korea during the late 20th century and is often enjoyed with pickled radish and beer, a pairing known as 'chimaek' (chicken and maekju, meaning beer). It holds cultural significance as a common party food and late-night snack.

Korean Fried Chicken

American pancakes are small, thick, leavened griddle cakes, ten to fifteen centimetres across and a centimetre or more high, made from a batter of flour, milk or buttermilk, egg, melted butter, a little sugar and baking powder or soda, cooked on a flat-top and served in a stack with butter and maple syrup. The thickness is the whole difference from a French crêpe or a Dutch pannenkoek: chemical leavening makes the batter rise on the griddle into a soft, open crumb, and the stack of three is the standard diner order, with bacon, sausage or eggs alongside at breakfast. They descend from the griddle cakes of colonial New England, where cornmeal johnnycakes came first and wheat flour pancakes followed, and the name "flapjack" and "hotcake" survive regionally for the same thing. Buttermilk pancakes, where the acid reacts with baking soda, are the diner and home standard; blueberry, chocolate chip and banana are the common additions, folded in or dropped onto the raw top.

The batter is mixed as little as possible: the dry ingredients in one bowl, the wet in another, combined with a few strokes and left lumpy, because overmixing develops gluten and gives a tough, flat cake. It rests for ten minutes so the flour hydrates and the leavening begins to work. The griddle is medium-hot, about 190°C, lightly buttered or oiled; a ladle of batter goes down and is left alone until bubbles form across the surface and the edges look dry, around two minutes, then flipped once and cooked for another minute. A pancake flipped twice or pressed with the spatula loses its rise. A fluffier result comes from separating the eggs and folding in whipped whites, which is how the thick Japanese-style soufflé pancake is made; a thinner, crisper edge comes from more butter on the griddle.

A good pancake is evenly golden on both faces with no pale centre or dark ring, tall, and springs back slightly when pressed; the inside is soft, moist and uniformly open, with no gummy layer near the base and no raw-batter taste. It should taste of butter and a little salt with the sweetness coming from the syrup, not the batter. Mark down a flat, dense pancake from overmixed or old batter, a rubbery one from too much egg, a pale greasy one from a cool griddle, scorched spots from a hot one, a stack that has gone soggy under the lid while waiting, and pancake syrup made from corn syrup and flavouring passed off as maple. Whipped cream and fruit are a dessert; at breakfast they should be optional and listed as such.

American pancakes

Smoked Beef

Çılbır is the Turkish dish of poached eggs on garlic yoghurt, finished with butter that has been heated with Aleppo or red pepper flakes until it foams and turns red, and eaten with bread for breakfast or as a light supper. It has a documented Ottoman past: the word appears in fifteenth-century palace records as a general term for eggs cooked in water, and the yoghurt version is the one that survived into the Republic and onto the menus of Istanbul's breakfast places, where it now sits alongside menemen and sucuklu yumurta. Outside Turkey it has had a second life since the 2010s as "Turkish eggs" on brunch menus from London to Melbourne, often with the yoghurt whipped with feta and dill, which is a different and softer dish. The original is three things on a plate, and each has to be right.

The yoghurt is thick, full-fat and at room temperature, beaten smooth with a crushed garlic clove and salt; cold yoghurt straight from the fridge sets the butter and makes the plate taste of nothing. The eggs are poached in barely simmering water with a splash of vinegar for about three minutes, so the white is fully set and the yolk runs, then drained on a cloth. The butter is the step that goes wrong: it is melted in a small pan, the pepper flakes are added, and it is heated only until it foams and the flakes colour the fat, which takes seconds; longer and the pepper turns bitter and the butter browns. Some cooks use pul biber, some Urfa pepper for a darker, smokier note, and a few add a little dried mint. The eggs go on the yoghurt, the red butter is spooned over so it pools in the yoghurt and runs down the sides, and the plate goes out with warm bread.

Cut the egg first: the yolk should flood into the yoghurt and the white should be fully opaque with no raw jelly. The yoghurt should be thick enough to hold a spoon mark, mildly sour, with the garlic present but not raw-hot, and the butter should be bright red, lightly spiced and fragrant, not brown or acrid. Together on the bread the three should taste richer than any of them alone. Mark down a cold plate, hard yolks, watery or thin yoghurt that has been loosened with water or milk, butter that has been overheated to a brown sludge, pepper flakes that are scorched, and the brunch versions where feta, dill, chilli oil or dukkah are piled on to the point where the egg and yoghurt are lost. One egg is a snack; two is the dish.

Çilbir

She is back. They are back to buns and it makes this food great. Crispy chicken, perfect sauce and green onions. Every time I order this.

Meat cuts on the bottom, korean spicy sauce with some sugary soy on top. Nuts and fresh green onions gave crispy taste. Too much salty taste i felt. Plain starter. I wouldn’t order again probably.

Eggs were cold, the yogurt sauce at the bottom was too liquified for cilbir. Lettuces are redundant for this dish. 

Really nice pancakes, perfectly cooked and still hot when served. The sugary, slightly sour jam was a perfect match, and the fresh strawberries were delicious though a few more wouldn’t hurt. Loved the handmade cream on top. All in all, a satisfying sweet dish for lunch.

Very tasty sandwich it was a bit spicy for me but the taste was great! I have to say price is a bit too much.

Frenchie Restaurant

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