Breakfast Week Recap: Free School Meals, Bodega Bagels, Breakfast Soup

This week, Eater was all about breakfast: doughnuts, egg sandwiches, pastries, porridges, cage-free eggs, secret burritos, and so much more. Check out some of the top stories of the week right here, then catch up on breakfast-related content across the Eater universe.

In Vietnam, pho is a breakfast tradition changing with the times
Amy McKeever

Mornings are historically a special time for pho in Vietnam. But these days you can increasingly find this iconic noodle soup at any time of day as shop owners lengthen their hours across the country. How did it come to be that way? Where is pho's role as a quintessential breakfast dish headed?

The radical origins of free breakfast for children
Arielle Milkman

Fifty years ago, in 1966, the U.S. federal government started playing with a radical idea: serving free breakfast in schools. School breakfast programming started small and inauspiciously with a two-year pilot program conceived and championed by Kentucky congressman Carl Perkins. It is now one of the U.S. government's largest welfare programs.

Everything you ever wanted to know about bodega bagels (but were afraid to ask)
Serena Dai

Eater can only reasonably account for the bagel suppliers of a few thousand bodegas. That leaves many thousands of other bodegas whose bagel bakeries remain a mystery. So before you completely dismiss your local bodega as a source for a terrible bagel, look again. Ask where it's from. Then take a moment, sit down, and really think about that bagel as you eat it. Maybe you'll appreciate that the softer texture holds in the sandwich well, or maybe it will be chewier than you expected. Think past the reputation you've come to know, and you might find that the bodega bagel is not so bad after all.

Elevenses: five whiskies fit for morning

Susan H. Gordon

Before there was brunch, there was elevenses, the late-morning English tea break which landed on American shores in the early 1800s—with an New World twist. During its brief stateside stay, American elevenses meant whiskey.

There's no place like HomeState
Meghan McCarron

The restaurant's devotion to Texas isn't really even about food. Valdez says if someone is disappointed in the food, she's okay with that. Breakfast tacos and migas especially are dishes often first experienced in the home, made by mothers and grandmothers. That's an impossible bar for a restaurant to clear. But service is an entirely different story.

Mexican conchas: the cookie-topped bread with a mysterious past
Daniela Galarza

On Saturday mornings, the chaos inside Pastelería Ideal —€” one of Mexico City's biggest and most famous bakeries —€” mimics that of Grand Central Terminal during rush hour. One of the few differences is the aroma: The pastry shop lures guests in with the smells of sugar, butter, and dusty, toasted bread flour. Over 500 different types of sweet pastries, breads, desserts, cookies, flans, cakes, and candies beckon from every corner, stand at attention on towering tables in the center of the large atrium, line glass cases along the perimeter of the space, and dangle from shelves high and low. And though the bakery staff swears there isn't really a best-seller, it's the conchas —€” a type of sweet roll topped with a cookie crust shaped for its namesake, a seashell —€” that almost always sell out first.

What French toast taught me about American food
Sonia Chopra

I didn’t know people ate French toast sweet until I was 14 years old. I grew up eating it salty-hot, thick slices of challah battered in peppery eggs and milk, then browned in a pan and cut on the bias and plated with ketchup and sharp cheddar. It was arguably the dish of my childhood, the thing I ate most frequently, because French toast is filling and comforting and — as they say — as easy as the Sunday mornings on which it was usually served.