The 10 best breakfast sandwiches in Chicago for a persnickety morning commuter
Now that you’re headed back to the office, you need a handheld that can be wolfed down in minutes without a mess.
The 10 best breakfast sandwiches in Chicago for a persnickety morning commuter
Now that you’re headed back to the office, you need a handheld that can be wolfed down in minutes without a mess.
I spent the better part of 11 years chasing my ideal breakfast sandwich in Chicago. Pertly round and small enough to hold in one hand, this once-elusive creature is engineered to welcome, not fight, being eaten.
Assembled on bread with some give and a pleasing edge of crunch, its straightforward egg, (fully) melted cheese and optional meat fillings harmonize in a savory chorus. I prefer the egg a bit runny; if hard-cooked or scrambled, I like a swipe of tangy mayo for moisture. I’ll allow a few spicy arugula leaves, or cooked or pickled veggies, but let’s keep it tidy. After all, this handheld must be wolfed down in moments, hunched at a counter or walking to the “L.”
Done right, it leaves me satiated, not sluggish, ready to take on whatever the day’s remains have in store.
For too long, we Chicagoans settled for indifferent, bordering on hostile, commuter breakfasts: rubbery eggs and limp bacon on industrial English muffins, well-meaning if unforgivably chewy bagel or baguette breakfast sandwiches overstuffed with slippery contents that squished out both sides. (Have you ever tried to pick up a fat avocado slice coated in egg yolk? So have I.) But no more! Perusing my insufferable checklist, I realize — finally — what a terrific time it is to be a persnickety breakfast sandwich lover in Chicago.
What follows is a list of my favorite utilitarian — and wholly delicious — commuter breakfast sandwiches, culled from an already ascendant category that exploded amid the pandemic. You’ll find newcomer cafes (Afro Joe’s, Kasama, Doma), pop-ups-turned standalones (Loaf Lounge, TriBecca’s) and restaurants with walk-up windows (Superkhana International) gracing us with morning-time handhelds that again raise a bar set high by places like Spinning J and Reno.
What’s not on the list below? While there’s a place and time for saucy, knife-and-fork breakfast sandwiches that require a nap, it’s neither here nor now.
See our 10 favorite Chicago breakfast sandwiches right now.
The category darling
If, like me, you’ve braved the legendary lines at Kasama in Ukrainian Village for its standout longanisa, egg and cheese breakfast sandwich ($9.50), you probably know you’re eating a lovingly perfected, cheffy facsimile of McDonald’s Sausage Egg McMuffin.
It’s hard to overstate the impact of the Egg McMuffin on Americans’ car-loving groupthink regarding the breakfast sandwich. After all, the thing was engineered within an inch of its life for portability, consistency and broad likability. (One could reasonably extrapolate that fast food claims a lot of the credit for our ongoing obsession with smashburgers, too.)
But for Chicago chefs and bakers hellbent on quality ingredients, appearance is where the similarities end.
“McDonald’s was our pinnacle, like how close can we get our breakfast sandwich to this?” chef/co-owner Genie Kwon told me in 2020. Kwon developed the custardy egg soufflé star, which is cut into squares. Meanwhile, Kwon’s husband, chef/co-owner Timothy Flores, spent two years perfecting the sausage, garlicky and sweet with caramelized edges. The cheese is dutifully American for the melt factor, the bread a squishy Martin’s Potato Roll (chosen after extensive tests with housemade brioche and milk buns).
“It’s that chewy, I-don’t-want-to-say sh*tty white bread you liked growing up,” Flores said. “It’s squishy and nostalgic — and it allows the textures of the fillings to each stand out.”
Breakfast sandwiches where the bread is the star
The main element separating a great breakfast sandwich from a good one is the bread. It holds soft fillings and lends heft without detracting too much flavorwise. Flaky biscuits too often crumble like a buttery house of cards; the glutinous chew of most baguettes and bagels push out the fragile egg.
One superior exception (because there always are), is the breakfast sandwich on housemade bagel ($10) at Sweet Moon Cafe & Bakery in Ravenswood. The light, porous sesame bagel gently cradles the soft-scrambled egg, melted muenster and diminutive hashbrown. Compact enough to counterbalance its richness, it’s a textural triumph — and sells out quickly on weekends, by the way.
Bread’s tenderness, or squish factor, is crucial for eatability. This is why I usually go for a brioche bun, or my favorite: the housemade English muffin. An English muffin is tender, nooked and crannied — not to mention conveniently egg-sized; it sponges up sauce and gently expands and contracts like an edible trampoline. At Humboldt Park’s Spinning J Bakery and Soda Fountain, an employee’s English muffin recipe was, in fact, the jumping off point for the namesake breakfast sandwich ($8) that has drawn long customer lines since 2015.
“Our current bread baker has been with us for eight-and-a-half years,” said owner Dinah Grossman, noting the quality that comes with dedicated repetition. “He makes tens of thousands of them by hand each year, and they just keep getting better.”
From there, it’s a simple matter of honoring the bread with good-quality fillings: a slick of good butter, scrambled eggs (because the cafe operates without a flat top or open flame) and sharp white cheddar, nodding to Grossman’s New England roots. It all melds into a soothing textural delight, much more than the sum of its parts.
I only slightly prefer the breakfast sandwich on a housemade sourdough English muffin ($9 for veggie, $10 for sausage) at Loaf Lounge in Avondale, in large part because it self-sauces through an easyish egg. That first bite releases a golden river of yolk through which I drag subsequent bites of my go-to, the veggie, with zingy pickled mushrooms, gently bitter braised kale, oozing American cheese and herby mayo.
My husband, on the other hand, always goes for the version starring maple- and garlic-infused sausage. Married chefs and owners Ben Lustbader and Sarah Mispagel-Lustbader are forever tweaking — replacing black garlic with sweet roasted garlic in the sausage — and testing new creations, lately a decadent breakfast sandwich with housemade pastrami on a marbled rye muffin. (Note: It has since become a breakfast burrito.)
“It’s probably objectively too much work and too many ingredients, but it is the thing I want it to be,” Lustbader said of the seemingly basic sausage, egg and cheese. “It makes me really happy that people like it … or I guess I should say ‘them.’ I feel the same about the veggie, capicola and now pastrami.”
The meat of the matter
Meat indeed can make the sandwich, like the Bronzeville breakfast sandwich ($8.25) at Afro Joe’s in Beverly. Last time I was in, an employee suggested I try the turkey sausage because that’s her favorite — and I may never go back. Two smallish patties ensure you get piquant, rich meat in every bite of this sandwich, which is both strapping and confoundingly fluffy. Even better, fast food had zero hand in its creation. It was inspired by executive chef Aisha Griffin’s childhood.
“The inspiration was improving on the blueprint of the past,” said Griffin, who is also chief operating officer of Afro Joe’s. “My grandmother was quick to make me a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich whether for breakfast or breakfast for dinner, and it’s one of my favorite things to eat to this day.”
Griffin elevated the simple toast with soft-scrambled eggs and chunks of cheddar by scrambling and baking eggs until fluffy, then ingeniously melting sharp cheddar right into the Publican Quality Bread brioche bun. She smears the other half with just enough garlicky chipotle mayo to moisten and add tangy, spicy interest.
Because at the end of the day, it’s the small choices — Griffin calibrating the oven temp to get the perfect airiness in the baked eggs or Lustbader nerding out about maple syrup lowering sausage’s pH — that betray the care with which bakeries and cafes craft this simple handheld that for so long went overlooked. And what’s wrong with being persnickety about breakfast sandwiches anyway?
Maggie Hennessy is a Chicago-based food and drink writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Bon Appetit and Food & Wine. Follow her on Instagram.