Icehouse

Sunday brunch is a beautiful thing.  An easy walk from my apartment after church, Icehouse has been on my must-visit list for months. What sealed the deal today was my discovery that Actual Wolf, a local favorite of mine, was playing the brunch hour.  Good music + good company + good food + good drinks = Sunday afternoon happiness.

We started with drinks, which I don't normally do in the middle of the day. But the description alone of the bacony bloody mary with mini doughnut and the souped up screwdriver would have made us feel a bit sheepish not test-driving the bar. Before taking a sip (or five) of my friend's bloody, I was not likely to refer to myself as a bloody mary fan.  I was incorrect, evidently I'm just a snob.  If all bloody marys tasted like this, peppery and dense with a hint of a kick, garnished with a thick slice of bacon and a bacon-crusted doughnut...well...then I'd be a bloody mary fan.  For now, I'll just say I'm an Icehouse bloody mary fan and stick with that. My screwdriver was a little too wonderful.  Dangerously easy to drink, it woke up every corner of my mouth, which was great considering what was next.

We decided to share the Pastrami and Egg sandwich and the Pork Biscuit. I struggle here.  Because the pork biscuit really was delicious.  The biscuit alone was worth the price of the dish, just because it's tough to find a truly top notch homemade biscuit in these parts.  Southerners are picky about biscuits and this one is one of the best I've had in years. Wonderfully flour-y on the crust, but with that soft, salty butter flavor permeating every bite.  The pork and egg, too, were expertly cooked and seasoned.  Even the gravy, if I could forgive one element, was fantastic.  But to me, a biscuit with "sausage gravy" implies a white gravy, a dense, flour-laden, peppery sausage gravy.  So the brown gravy was off-putting, again, not because of the flavor (perfect!) but because it was the "wrong" gravy for that dish.  If it was a dinner dish, an evening sandwich with a brown gravy would be heavenly.  But sausage gravy on a biscuit should always be white.  And I'm comfortable with how judgmental I am about that.

The pastrami sandwich was just a masterpiece.  The onion roll, the pastrami, the homemade pickles, the juicy, yolky egg, the smear of harissa, they were just the perfect combination.  We both thought that while the biscuit was delicious, the pastrami sandwich was the real winner.  It's the sandwich I'll rave about to anyone thinking about brunch on Eat Street.  And it will likely lure me back very soon.

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