The Case for Unnecessary Breakfast

Some food exists to fuel you. Some food exists because your mother made it on your birthday and now nothing else will do.

Growing up, birthdays in our house meant fried chicken and waffles. My mother made it, we ate it at the table, and at some point it stopped being a birthday thing and became the thing we associated with being taken care of. A thousand calories before 10am, completely impractical, entirely the point.

The year before last, I tried to bring it to Cafe Stone. The dish itself was never the problem. The problem was that I got in my own way — decided that if we were going to serve fried chicken at 9am, we should at least try to make it responsible. So we added a salad. A salad. As if a handful of greens next to fried chicken was going to settle anyone's conscience. It didn't work, it didn't make sense, and we dropped it.

Here's the thing about chicken and waffles: it's not that deep. It's a great breakfast, once in a while. It's indulgent and it's supposed to be. The salad was a mistake because it was trying to apologise for something that didn't need apologising for. Nobody in Bangalore is really doing this properly either, which felt like reason enough to just go ahead and do it right.

This time I came back to the original logic. No salad. The dish is fried chicken on a waffle with maple syrup, and the only question worth asking is how to make it better. The maple was doing its job - sweet, sticky, the obvious pairing, but I wanted a savoury element that could hold its own against it. Hot honey wasn't the answer, too one-note. Bacon ranch was. Bacon is almost always the right answer for everything — the smokiness, the salt, the sheer baconiness of it. When I tasted it against the maple and the crunch of the chicken, it just worked. Rounded the whole thing off.

This is a weekend special, not a permanent fixture. That's deliberate. Chicken and waffles is the kind of thing that should be eaten once in a while — savoured, not routine. Two days, then it's gone.

The image at the very top is one I drew by hand. There are photos of the dish, good ones, but every platform right now is drowning in generated content and polished graphics. Drawing it felt more honest for something that's essentially just a good breakfast and a good memory.

We're doing this at Cafe Stone this weekend. February 28th to March 1st, 9am to 1pm.