McDonald's Egg McMuffin is, in all its simplicity, pretty genius. I mean you get some egg and bacon, you get some cheese, all sandwiched in an English muffin. It doesn't taste good, of course, but the basic concept is sound.
Lately we have undertaken a search for the best Egg McMuffin replacement, which is harder than one might think. The simplicity of the sandwich makes it difficult to create a truly special replacement -- making something more basic at home with quality ingredients is easier -- but certain creative takes have impressed. Others have disappointed.
To get to the point, how did 9th Street Bistro's "fried egg sandwich" fare? Not well, but not downright horribly either. Kind of below average, I suppose.
The actual idea behind it is sound: Adding basil pesto and gouda to the palette should spice things up a bit, but the execution sort of fell flat.
One of the main issues was the bread itself. The sourdough was just a bit dull felt a little stale during our visit. Toasted, as it was, didn't really mask the latter either.
The assembly of the sandwich didn't help. The problem -- and this was probably related to the quality of the bread -- was putting all the stash on the bottom slice. Biting into the sandwich, and we couldn't really pick up on the pesto and cheese, both overpowered by the bread. We did, in fact, have to make it an open faced sandwich to really start finding the flavors.
And at that point things improved. The pesto mayo wasn't bad at all and went well with the eggs. The bread even received somewhat of a resurrection, what with the moisture pulling into it and all.
The fact we had to disassemble the sandwich kind of makes the sandwich a failure though. There wasn't enough here to make it particularly memorable at any rate, and, again, having to remove a slice of bread to make the sandwich acceptable? Yeah, no.
A bad start to our Great Egg McMuffin Chase, then, but that's all it is too. A start. More to come, but for now we'd pass on 9th Street Bistro's "fried egg sandwich".