Now that the reborn Chase Park Plaza is pretty much a part of life in the Central West End, it seems to be time for another visit to brunch at Eau. The restaurant looks the same, its handsome, solid-feeling décor calling for Gin Martinis and a hat check room full of fedoras. Across the hall, the Café serves as a smoking area. (Alas, the terrace of tables overlooking the pool isn’t available for brunch.) Between the two, a cunningly laid trap, the dessert table tiered with goodies sings its siren song.
But the management and kitchen have changed hands since the opening – in fact, it was shortly after I wrote here that the brunch was the best in town.
Mimosas are poured with a generous hand, something that happens less frequently than it should. (Neither orange juice nor sparkling wine need be terribly expensive to produce an adequate rendition of a Mimosa.) The coffee was good, reasonably hot, and nowhere did one see the sachets of powdered creamer.
Pastries have a pleasantly handmade feeling. Croissants are a little chewier and less flaky than the classic renditions, but they stand up far better to the rigors of accompanying a main course. The star of the Danish selections was a six-sided turnover with a cream-cheese filling in a butter-laden flaky dough. And is there anywhere else in town offering scones at brunch?
The cold table features marinated tomatoes in a dressing not unlike what one might find on vitello tonnato, a tuna mayonnaise, and quite perky. Pasta salads are often snoozers, filling a spot on the table with a cheap, boring item, but this one sang with a pesto dressing punctuated with capers, a great combination that someone should have thought of sooner. And the grilled vegetables score with a vinaigrette seasoned lightly with fresh rosemary, so gently handled that at first one wonders if it’s ginger.
Platters of stone crab claws, snow crab legs and a few large boiled shrimp rest on the counter that looks into the kitchen. Nearby are a peppered whitefish, moist and delicious, and a large slab of salmon, probably smoked in-house. There’s a smoker in the kitchen, certainly, and other products from it are found, for no apparent reason, at one end of the omelet station: pulled pork, tender but slightly dry and with no sauce available, and sliced brisket in a barbecue sauce that’s noticeably fruity. More interesting items await, however.
Baked fish, for instance, is another cliché at brunches. Bland and boring, it makes many of us think of school cafeterias – but not this one. Labeled “bacalao,” it’s white fish, presumably cod, in a spicy, saffron-laced rice, like nothing the ladies in hairnets ever dished out. The rice survives its ride in a chafing dish well, meaning the temperature isn’t enough to overcook the fish, either. Pork with a sage dressing, nicely moist, and an apple gravy wait nearby. And the chicken is breasts stuffed with prosciutto, giving life to the bland meat.
Lunch items predominate here, both in quantity and quality. The eggs Benedict are rather bland, and so is the bacon, for instance. But the french toast made with raisin bread is moist and full of flavor, the nearby maple syrup nicely superfluous.
Near the end of the meal, let me point out that the cheese tray, which is set up with the salads, is above average. There’s a bowl of fruit, as well, or one can wander out to the aforementioned display at the entrance and pick up a few berries. To walk away from it with those few berries requires a degree of self-control that few of us have, though.
A couple of biscotti? A chocolate chip cookie, looking like it came from your auntie’s oven? And then there’s the coconut cake, the cheesecake, the small chocolate parfaits … oh, heck, seduced again. Perhaps the best of all are the small chocolate domes, looking mysterious and sophisticated. These turn out to be chocolate mousse covered in a thin layer of ganache and edged with crumbles of praline. The mousse is pale but tastes deeply, seriously chocolate-y. The whole thing rests on a circle of pastry moistened with the mousse, adding a little more texture. It’s a fine example of pastry chef-ery.
All in all, the brunch is solid, but not a contender for first place.
This article appears in March 2024.