Le Pain Quotidien

What a wonderful, civilized way to start the day. Comfortable, quality food, nice atmosphere, and food, it's about the food. And this is a chain! No obnoxious florescent lighting in fast-food places, no scary counters with disgruntled teenage and senior servers. You walk in past jams, teas, and pastries. Most of the time you can seat yourself at a few single tables or at the communal tables of rustic wood. No impersonal Formica or the stench of ammonia cleaners. No annoying posters advertising the latest 99cent menu option. The walls are rub painted a warm tan and old metal farm tractor seats act as artwork. I could sit here all day ... or at least until the stroller families overwhelm the place around noon.

Starting the morning off is important for my dad. Left to my own devices, I would sleep in until noon. But I must admit it is nice to enjoy the city before others awake and start making it more frenetic. For a brief moment, the light is filtered through low eastern angles, the air seems a little cleaner, the streets a lot emptier, and we have the whole back area of Quotidien on W 72nd to ourselves.

We always get the bread selection. NYC is blessed with great bread. Perhaps it's all in the water. We have the best water, still not chlorinated, but that soon will change. Lets hope we learn to protect our watershed instead of fracking and pollution the crap out of it for short-term profits. But right now we have the best drinking water I've ever used. The jams are great; my fav is the apricot with huge chucks of half-apricots throughout.

I had a warming cappuccino and a soft-boiled egg, which reminds me of my youth. Mom used to put the egg into these cute cup holders; the one I remember vividly was this sort of elf and she'd put a little cap on the egg for the hat. Who does that anymore? So some of that nostalgia floods back as I use my spoon to tap, tap, tap the top of the shell, making tiny cracks allowing me to peel it away. The spoon feels a tug of resistance on the egg white covering. Once through, it's golden delight reaching the yolky center. I try my best to scoop and mix all the contents to even out yolk-to-white spoonfuls.

There's an art to eating a soft-boiled egg. It comes back so easily. But it helps to enjoy it with family, on a nice cold winter morning in New York, in a nice, quite spot, before the world is fully awake.