Benedict's Breakfast

A proper Benedict lives or dies on the sauce, and Benedict's makes its own — a creamy, homemade hollandaise ladled over poached eggs and peameal bacon, the dish the King Street kitchen named itself after. The menu gives that section its own heading, Famous Benedict's, and treats it as the house specialty: the same hollandaise and a bed of grilled home fries carried across a row of variations. This is all-day breakfast in downtown Welland, a family-owned kitchen that serves morning and lunch and closes its doors by mid-afternoon. Breakfast runs the length of the day here; there is no point on the clock, right up to close, when the griddle isn't the centre of the kitchen.

The Benedicts are where the kitchen concentrates. The house version sets two poached eggs and peameal bacon on English muffins, blankets them in that hollandaise, and sends them out with grilled home fries; from there the section fans out into bacon or ham, a Florentine, a Greco, a California, and a baked-bean variation. It is a narrow idea worked wide — one sauce, one technique, and enough small turns that a regular can order the same heading a dozen mornings and not repeat themselves. Benny's Hash carries the same logic onto a single plate, piling baked beans, grilled home fries, fried onions, and a fried egg under the hollandaise, toast alongside.