Lankford is the homiest restaurant in the city. I stopped by for breakfast one Saturday morning about a week before Easter; owner Eydie Prior had decorated the place with eggs and bunnies. I counted 20 bunnies hanging from the ceiling, perching on shelves and sitting on tables. The Price Is Right was blaring from the television set over the bar, while Sesame Street was showing in the kitchen. Eydie's granddaughter Sydney was commuting between the two programs. Sydney's mother and Eydie's daughter-in-law, Jessica, is the waitstaff at Lankford's.
Lankford's really was a grocery when Eydie's parents opened it in 1939, and she grew up in the house next door. But the hamburgers were the thing that really caught on, and so, in 1977 Eydie converted the place into a restaurant. The dining room seems located in what was once a garage. The smoking section comprises two picnic tables on a former driveway now resplendent with orange marigolds growing out of coffee cans.
Every couple of months Eydie goes on a seasonal decorating binge. Spring is the motif on this visit. Garlands of sunflowers are hung from the rafters, and the vinyl tablecloths feature the word "spring" in a floral pattern of festive colors. On every table there is a six-pack beer carton posing as a condiment holder: Each holds a bottle of hot sauce, a bottle of ketchup and two seven-ounce Corona bottles filled with salt and pepper; this month the two empty spaces contain vases filled with fabric sunflowers.
The television over the bar is tuned to a particularly annoying cartoon on the Nick Jr. network, although Sydney is nowhere in sight. The restaurant's patrons, an eccentric bunch of Montrose types in sandals, shorts and baseball caps, seem right at home with the preschool programming. In fact, one guy at the bar, who looks hungover, is actually staring at the tube slack-jawed while drinking coffee.
When I was in high school, breakfast was the first of the "three square meals a day," just as important as lunch or dinner. Mom would rise before 6 a.m. and cook, so she could send me and my five brothers off to school with a proper stick-to-the-ribs meal of fruit juice, eggs, meats, homemade potatoes or grits, and toast or English muffins. In those days, such fare was considered the healthiest of breakfasts.
This continued to be my breakfast of choice in college, but it was then that I realized all fried eggs were not created equal. The short-order eggs I encountered in the average diner had rubbery whites and yolks that were hard on the bottom, with a pervasive aroma of cheap cooking oil. You have to cook eggs slowly, my mom explained. "And you have to cook them in butter."
That was a long time ago. By the 1980s when my mom and dad retired to Florida, eggs and butter had fallen out of favor. Doctors, nutritionists and fad-diet divas targeted cholesterol as the primary problem with our diets. Low-fat and fiber-rich foods came into vogue. My mom's idea of a healthy breakfast changed from bacon and eggs to a bran muffin with chunks of cantaloupe. I endured this high-carbohydrate, low-protein regimen along with everybody else, thinking it was doing me good.
But not anymore. In the last few months I have once again been eating fried eggs and sausage, bacon or country ham, with glorious abandon. And with butter. While rediscovering the joys of eggs, I've also been auditioning some of Houston's fabulously eccentric restaurants for the new role of breakfast hangout.
The sign in the parking lot of Telwink Grill [4318 Telephone Road, (713)644-4933] says, "Best Breakfast in Texas." A 350-pound guy with a white beard and a Peterbilt cap occupies the first booth, confirming at a glance that this is indeed a truck stop. On a rainy Saturday morning, it is also packed. Co-owner and hostess Peggy Bokos leads those waiting on a table in spirited rounds of "Row Your Boat" between tirades exhorting table-squatters to pay up and leave.
"Can you believe those people are just sitting there reading the newspaper while there are babies waiting in line for breakfast?" she yells to the room.
