Tucked away in a Downtown hotel, one of the best breakfasts I’ve found in a long time waits to be discovered. The Capri restaurant in the Renaissance Grand Hotel lies below ground level under the immense atrium dome that dominates the lobby. It’s large, so well-lit that it almost feels like daylight and, like all good hotel restaurants, serves breakfast every day. It seems like it’s a perfect setup for the sort of nondescript food that corporations generally produce like public relations babble. Yet it’s nothing of the sort, at least until some suit decides that an interesting menu isn’t worth the effort. This is a menu with tempting choices using good products, and attention must be paid. It isn’t perfect, but its high points are exciting.
The lemon soufflé pancakes – credit is given to The Stanford Court in San Francisco, a hotel with a glorious food heritage and now a Renaissance property – were light, lacy cakes that arrived with raspberry purée and an orange butter as well as syrup. Tender and flavorful, they floated off the plate and into the heart. French toast is made with cinnamon rolls. It was like eating rounds of bread pudding, and the compote of vanilla-scented cooked apples they wore furthered the illusion. Syrup was totally unnecessary.
An order of biscuits and gravy produced a couple of biscuits and a small soup tureen of gravy. More sausage than gravy, it was wipe-the-plate delicious, vigorously seasoned and an antidote to the gallons of bland wallpaper paste stuff that’s out there. Eggs Benedict avoided the Styrofoam English muffin that plagues so many of their ilk. The hollandaise sauce was the buttery French classic, rather than the more zingy New Orleans style. New potatoes, with plenty of onions, were ready to chase down any escaping bits of egg or hollandaise, very satisfying if not as hot as they should have been.
The hotel clearly has a source for good meat. We had hoped the “Ozark ham” would be slices of the dense, salty country ham that places like Burgers’ Smokehouse offer. Alas, it wasn’t that but rather a mild city cure boneless ham. A natural-casing link sausage was firm and ungreasy, seasoned with sage. And then there was the peppered bacon, thickly cut, cooked to just before crispness except at the edges, which left it still juicy and chewy but not tough. I love bacon; this was utterly glorious.
The only thing that made me pause was grapefruit brûlée. Years ago, grapefruit halves, with the segments separated, were described in cookbooks I’ve read as being topped with sugar or honey and popped under the broiler until the sweetener bubbled and browned a little. This wasn’t that. Segments of ruby grapefruit arrived in a shallow dish like that used for a crème brûlée. It had been broiled – there were little traces of black in a few places. No sign of sugar, although the juice in the bottom of the dish was sweet and slightly salty. Very puzzling.
Nevertheless, I’ll be back, to try the rest of the pancake selection, the oatmeal brûlée, even the breakfast burrito. I have enough faith in the morning food here that even that contemporary cliché may be lifted above the mundane.
And the staff? They’re clearly used to dealing with groups and business breakfasts. They’re cheerful and attentive and give customers plenty of room to spread out with carafes of coffee (for decaf, also) and briefcases, too.
This article appears in March 2024.