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Are you hungry for breakfast?  Are you poor (or at least cheap)?  Good news!

Just in time for the recession, all Denny's restaurants across the nation are offering their Grand Slam breakfast for free tomorrow only from 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.  That's two pancakes, two eggs, two sausage links and two strips of bacon -- for free.  Sure, it's no Humongous Bucket of Eggs and Meat, but it's a free hot meal!  You can also add a side of hashbrowns for only $0.99.  Oh, and your coffee and orange juice are regular price.  Don't complain, Jack Benny; you can do what my tightwad friend does and order a bowl of lemons with your ice water.  Take some sugar packets, et voila!  Free lemonade!  (Seriously, please don't do that.)

Not that I'm thinking about theme food for a football game or anything, but what about this for an inspired Rust Belt/Sun Belt fusion dish?

My family is from Pittsburgh, so I associate the foods I ate in my youth with the Iron City. And I ate a lot of fried bologna and scrambled eggs. My father, who grew up in the South Hills part of town, considered fried bologna a delicacy. When he made us fried bologna sandwiches, he always made an incision on a radius from the center of the slice to the outer edge to allow the bologna to shrink. As I recall, the bologna was usually black by the time he was done frying it. For breakfast, he favored fried bologna and scrambled eggs.

I've been in Texas for most of the rest of my life, and the Tex-Mex dish called migas has become as common breakfast at my house. Robert Amaya of Amaya's Taco Village in Austin once told me that migas isn't really a breakfast dish among Tejanos. When he was growing up in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, his family didn't ate eggs for breakfast. They ate migas on Friday nights and during Lent when Catholics couldn't eat meat.

I put ham, chorizo or bacon in my migas sometimes, so the idea of substituting fried bologna seemed like a natural. Tasted great to me, but I can't say that anyone else at my house was interested in joining me for breakfast.

-Robb Walsh

Gospel Brunch at the newly-opened House of Blues is a funny thing.

You're sitting in a darkened concert hall, your ears ringing from the thundering sounds that rumble through the elaborate sound system and shake your bones, your eyes assaulted by a kaleidoscope of brightly-colored lights, all while you sip daintily at your bottomless mimosa and praise Jesus at an early (for some...) 11:00 in the morning.  To say that it's a dichotomic situation is putting it lightly.

That's not to say that Gospel Brunch won't be popular here in Houston, as it has been in the other nine cities where the House of Blues holds the event every Sunday.  I have no doubt that it will.  After all, there's nothing that a good Houstonian loves more than things that clash.

The French-Korean breakfast pastries at Tous Les Jours bakery in the H-Mart Korean grocery store at 1302 Blalock are a little different. The cream puffs are filled with sweet red bean paste and the long buns are stuffed with sweet potato paste. My favorite is the sweet and savory croissant with salty yellow American cheese on the inside and powdered sugar on the outside. The bakery café also offers espresso drinks and a wide selection of fruit juices.

Tous Les Jours started out as a French bakery in Korea when fresh baguettes were hard to come by. The first full service Tous Les Jours bakery opened in Gu-Ri, Korea in 1997. Customers buying bread wanted to sit down and eat fresh croissants and drink coffee, so beverages and a café seating area became part of the concept. The company started selling franchises and now has over 1000 bakery cafés in Korea, China, Vietnam, and the U.S. There are two Tous Le Jour bakery cafés in Texas--the other one is in Dallas.
-Robb Walsh

January 2nd was a funny kind of day.

A Friday, the day after New Year's Day, sandwiched between a citywide attempt to recover from a hangover and a weekend in which another one would soon take its place, January 2nd was eerily quiet and sober.  My grandmother and I drove aimlessly in the gray morning fog, searching in vain for a really good breakfast place that was open at 10:00 that morning and striking out glumly at each destination.

As we wandered down Fairview, I heard my grandmother exclaim, "Oh, look at the pretty rainbow chimney on that place!  What's that?" A goldmine, that's what: Baby Barnaby's was open for business!

At the newly refurbished shopping center on Memorial and Kirkwood that was once anchored by Hungry's and the slightly shady Russian food store, Moscow Market, a change has taken place.  This same change is pervading all of west Houston, as 1960s-era strip malls up and down Memorial are shaking off their old façades in favor of fancy slate tiles, stacked stone and varying shades of beige stucco and old favorites move over to make room for yuppie upstart chains like Pei Wei and Firehouse Subs.

In the space once occupied by neighborhood favorite, Hungry's (which has now moved further west on Memorial, past Dairy Ashford), the Colorado-based breakfast chain The Egg & I has moved in and made it their own.  The restaurant is now entirely unrecognizable from the dark, shabby haunt that Hungry's once inhabited.  Instead, high ceilings and streaming light abound.  Adorned with "wall words" and brightly-colored Tuscan-style plates on wrought-iron holders, The Egg & I reminds you of an enlarged version of a cheerful, if suburban, breakfast nook.