Breakfast Blues

I've always been a breakfast eater. Even in college, I would trek to the cafeteria for a bowl of cereal before heading to class. (I also felt it was a way to ensure I was getting my money's worth out of the meal plan.) But the Mrs. and I are not particularly good at keeping the house stocked with food, so I ran out of suitable breakfast foods. The obvious solution is to stop and get something on the way to work, and since I usually stop for coffee anyway, this isn't too difficult to accomplish. Or so I thought.

[Side note: I always have coffee at home along with breakfast, but by the time I get to work I'm ready for more. When my office moved recently, we got a new coffee-making machine, the kind that uses the little individual cylinders that are pre-filled with coffee and a tiny filter. Unfortunately, this coffee tastes only slightly better than the vile, nasty stuff we used to have that came in individual pouches, so for the foreseeable future, I will have to continue to buy coffee on the way to work. If the T ever has the (unlikely) common sense to install cupholders on its vehicles, I will consider a travel cup, because I need one hand to hold on and the other to hold the newspaper.]

Today I decided I was in the mood for a treat, something along the lines of a pastry, a danish, a cinnamon roll, that sort of thing. That pretty much excludes Dunkin' Donuts. I love doughnuts, but I do not care for Dunkin's doughnuts, and while their muffins are decent, that wasn't what I was after today. So I headed for the Espresso Royale Cafe on Gainsborough Street in the vicinity of Symphony Hall, which is on my way to work and which has a very nice selection of baked goods. I'm particularly fond of the coffee cake they sell, which is served in nice, thick squares with a dollop of raspberry syrup (or something) and a drizzle of icing on top. Mmmm...

The folks at Espresso Royale make an excellent cup of coffee, and the goodies are yummy (I don't know if those are made on the premises or brought in from elsewhere). But they are, collectively, not exactly the fastest group of baristas I have encountered. I'm sure they're all very nice people, but this is Boston after all, the land of people with zero patience who are always in a hurry (myself included). I've been in there probably about forty times over the past three months, and the staff have a distinctly... leisurely way of going about their work. Add in the fact that the students are in the process of returning to the area, and you get a line ten deep that isn't showing any outward signs of moving.

I turned around and headed back to Huntington Ave. There's a Starbucks around the corner. I'm not a big fan of the Seattle leviathan for various reasons, but they do have these maple-frosted scones that I like. Of course, the line in Starbucks was even longer than the line in ERC, so that was the end of that idea. I ended up walking a couple of blocks up Huntington to the Au Bon Pain at Northeastern, where I got a gigantic tub of iced coffee (seriously, it's like a quart) for only $2 and a mediocre cinnamon scone. Now I guess I should start thinking about lunch...