THE POWER BREAKFAST: NO LONGER TOAST

Power breakfasts are back in business. Jackie Hunter meets Ina Pinkney, the Chicago restaurateur whose pancakes played their part in Obama’s campaign ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2009

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully. “It’s the same thing,” he said.

~ A.A. Milne, “Winnie the Pooh”

Pooh got it right: breakfast is exciting. And important—in Chicago, anyway. When the political consultant David Axelrod sat down with his team to map out a campaign strategy for Barack Obama, he did it somewhere he knew they’d be guaranteed peace, privacy—and buttermilk pancakes topped with blueberries. Ina’s, an unassuming red-brick “breakfast restaurant” in Chicago’s West Loop market district, is at least partly responsible for Obama making it to the top.

Ina’s is a powerhouse for the power breakfast. Every weekday morning, the city’s lawyers, financiers, media moguls and politicians meet and eat under the maternal eye of its 65-year-old proprietor, Ina Pinkney, a woman who is a firm believer in breakfast meetings as fuel for the engine of business. “People are happy to meet up early,” she tells me, with a smile as wide and warm as a freshly baked croissant. “Once they get into their office they don’t want to have to leave in the middle of the day for a two-hour lunch.”

It’s often assumed that the modern power breakfast was a child of the 1980s, born when Ronald Reagan began assembling his kitchen cabinet in the White House dining room each morning. In March 1987, the New York Times reported a “quiet revolution” in the ongoing Americanisation of Britain, with more and more executives doing business over breakfast at London’s better hotels. In the same article, Mervyn King, now running the Bank of England but at that time professor of economics at the LSE, described the power breakfast as one of “America’s three great contributions to civilisation”, along with central heating and showers. Just look what breakfast did for him.

Yet the Regency Hotel in New York claims to have defined the concept a decade earlier, when its breakfast buffet became the place to be seen talking shop and networking. The gladiatorial breakfast can be traced back even further: didn’t Achilles—an advocate of the eve-of-conflict fast—take the advice of Odysseus and down a nectar smoothie at sunrise before heading into battle at Troy? And in 1815, a feature of the Vienna Congress was the café-au-lait-fuelled tête-a-tête between the French diplomat Talleyrand and his Austrian counterpart Metternich, negotiators of the future boundaries of Europe.

Ina Pinkney wasn’t inspired to open her “white-tablecloth breakfast restaurant” by history’s early-rising power-brokers. Her motivation, she says, was simply a desire to enjoy breakfast in a place that was “somewhere between the relaxed, Formica-top coffee shop and an upscale, formal hotel dining-room”.

So what has made it a success? Scrupulous attention to detail, she says—and privacy. “My goal is total sound-absorption,” she says, as earnest as a physicist. “The room is carpeted, the tables have distance between them, and each is covered with vinyl-backed foam, a fabric tablecloth, a piece of heavy-duty butcher paper and a soft table-paper.” As a result, Ina’s is the antithesis of clattery, chattery dining rooms; no corporate secrets can be overheard. The waiting staff is similarly discreet. “Once the food is served and the coffee topped up,” Ina says, “we stay away from the table as much as possible, so as not to interrupt.”

Her formula is as popular with weekend brunchers as it is with the business community. So much so that Ina herself misses out. “I never get to eat a hot breakfast on days when I’m working,” she admits. “I live for Monday mornings, when I am at home by myself and get to make a really good pot of coffee, eggs and toast. Then—like Pooh—I am in heaven.”

Ina’s 1,235 West Randolph St, Chicago, +1 312 226 8227,
breakfast served Mon-Fri 7am-11am, Sat 8am-2.30pm, Sun 9am-2pm

WAKE-UP CALLS: FIVE CITIES, FIVE EXCELLENT BREAKFASTS

Washington The Hay-Adams
It’s Washington. Power is all we’ve got—that, and the beautiful Hay-Adams hotel, just over the road from the White House. Try any of the organic egg dishes: omelettes, eggs Benedict or Florentine. Or be truly bipartisan and order chocolate pancakes and the crispy Belgian waffle. Insist on a table by the window to savour the Colombian coffee—and the best power view in the West.
~ MARGAUX BERGEN

16th and H Sts, Washington, DC, +1 (202) 638 2570,
Mon-Fri 6.30-11am, Sat & Sun 7-11am

Tokyo Hotel Okura
In the fifth-floor restaurant of the Okura—a modernist set-piece right out of an early Bond film—tables are set well apart under high ceilings, guaranteeing everything you utter is in confidence. White-jacketed staff serve a choice of classic continental, healthy or American menus—but most famous is the French toast, first choice for the politicians and financiers who breakfast there.
~ DOMINIC ZIEGLER

2-10-4 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo; +81 (3) 35 820 111,
breakfast daily 7-10am

London The Wolseley
A café in the grand European (as opposed to greasy English) tradition, the Wolseley—domed ceilings, Deco silverware and a staff of almost psychotic efficiency—is a London favourite. Weekdays see the PR pack comparing lookbooks over prunes with orange and ginger; at weekends, West End actors and rumpled clubbers refuel on Cumberland sausage sandwiches.
~ ISABEL LLOYD

160 Piccadilly, London W1; +44 (0)20 7499 6996,
breakfast Mon-Fri 7-11.30am, Sat & Sun 8-11.30am

Edinburgh The Balmoral
Power up from the à la carte menu or circumnavigate the spectacular buffet table at Edinburgh’s five-star Balmoral Hotel. Executives of every stripe greet the day in its fresh and airy breakfast room, where international tastes are superbly catered for: granola, fruit, pastries, sushi, omelettes, charcuterie—and, of course, the Full Scottish, complete with grilled black pudding.
~ JH

1 Princes St, Edinburgh; +44 (0)131 556 2414,
breakfast Mon-Fri 7-10.30am, Sat 7-11am, Sun 7.30-11am

Paris L’Avenue
There can be few choicer spots for a breakfast meeting in Paris than this elegant brasserie, wrapped monochromatically around a corner of Avenue Montaigne and fringed outside with an inviting rank of linen-clad tables. The staff are swift and attentive, and the breakfast menu refreshingly international: all kinds of eggs, muesli, pastries and fruit salads, as well as particularly good coffee.
~ SARAH DALLAS

41 Ave Montaigne, Paris; +33 (0)1 40 70 14 91,
breakfast Mon-Sat 8am-12pm, Sun 9am-12pm

Picture Credit: Jacob Silberberg/Panos

(Jackie Hunter is features editor of the Scotsman. For breakfast she would recommend the porridge.)

Lifestyle  Food & Drink  Places  spring 2009