TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

BY PETE TITTL

Contributing columnist

pftittl@gmail.com

The achievement of winning the James Beard Award, the Oscar of the culinary world, would seem to make any further discussion of the Noriega Hotel moot. I mean, when you've reached the pinnacle among U.S. restaurants, as the east Bakersfield mainstay did in 2011, what more is there to say?

Plenty, actually. Somehow, in all my visits to the restaurant over the years, I had never had breakfast there. And, frankly, I will jump at any excuse that takes me to the restaurant, so in awe am I of any food establishment that has been open since 1893. What a stunning achievement that is.

Friend and reader Dennis Smith was the one who told me I needed to check it out. He makes a habit of visiting every Saturday morning with co-workers and considers it a great way to start a weekend. His lone complaint, he said, is that they make the bacon too crisp.

Bacon too crisp? Is that possible? Before our visit I thought that if that's the worst you can say about a breakfast, we are in for a great meal.

However, Dennis is right on the mark. The bacon is too crisp, and my son and daughter (dining companions on this early morning foray) agreed. I'm not sure how they prepare this thick-cut bacon but deep frying would seem a possibility. It is actually a challenge to eat, no matter how sharp your teeth. Maybe my choppers are just getting weak with age.

But there were other things at the Noriega Hotel breakfast that make it worth visiting. One warning: They really like reservations, though when we arrived on a Saturday morning, there was only one other couple already seated at the long family-style tables. The bar, however, was hopping with old friends drinking all sorts of concoctions, some involving orange juice, some not. And no sporting events were pulling them in. The TV in the corner was tuned to a cartoon.

The way it works is you check in with the waitress in the dining room and return to the bar to wait until your food is cooked, at which point you're summoned to the back. (That took about 10 minutes in our case.) And it's a family-style array of over-easy fried eggs, mushroom omelet, fresh cut French fries, Basque sausage (still in the casing, and cut into short stumps so the innards fairly explode out each end in the cooking process), salsa, bread, hard jack cheese and coffee or red wine. We chose coffee but the retired man seated next to my son offered him a bit of his wine. If you want coffee, bring a mug in from the bar. We failed to do that, being new to this whole experience.

Unlike lunch and dinner, which have daily specials, the breakfast menu is pretty much the same every day. The menu said we would get ham but instead we received thin cut, pan-fried pork chops, which were even better. The fries were amazing as usual. I, for one, am proud that these have made it to a breakfast table somewhere. Who needs hash browns when you can get these? The omelet seemed a tad too simple for me, as if begging for some cheese, but you could take all these ingredients and do what my son did, which was make a sandwich with the sourdough bread, the fried eggs, the cheese and sausage. Such is the impact of years of fast-food breakfast sandwiches.

It's also fun to eavesdrop at this place. The four men to my right were sorting through the likely chores of the day, the work week past and upcoming visits from relatives.

"I'm gonna go out, cut some wood, then come back and sit at the bar," one said with a laugh.

Yeah, a feast like this is a great prelude to a day of chores. Even if the bacon makes your jaw ache.