Pizza at Tiffany’s
Back in the day, breakfast at US restaurants pretty much meant you were limited to the old standbys: pancakes, waffles, eggs, French toast, hash browns, bacon and sausage. The 1970’s gave us the breakfast sandwich (Breakfast Jack and Egg McMuffin) and breakfast burrito. In 2004 we saw the breakfast burger (courtesy of Carl’s Jr.) Today the breakfast sandwich have been done to death, built on everything from biscuits to croissants to bagels to tortillas to sour dough bread to pancakes and filled with every protein imaginable. So what is left you ask? A simple bit of deductive logic (aka “The Breakfast Pizza Theorem”) provides the answer:
- Breakfast is good
- Pizza is good
- Pizza for breakfast is good
Now if you were one of the countless millions of us who have awoken on a Saturday morning and rummaged around the fridge for those little slices of tomato, sausage and cheese covered slices of heaven leftover from the previous evening’s meal out, the answer was obvious. Once seemingly solely the purview of lunch and dinner dining, pizza seems poised to burst its daypart boundaries and take its place in the pantheon of breakfast heroes (not the sandwich):
- Ortine, located in Brooklyn, NY, offers up a thin crust pizza blanketed in goat cheese and parmesan with a generous handful of chopped pancetta, a sprinkle of herbs, and two hard-cooked eggs looking up.
- Motorino menus Pizza Al’Uovo, layered with fior di latte mozzarella, three fried eggs, pancetta, basil, and pecorino romano cheese on their weekend brunch menu.
- 57 Napoli Pizza e Vino makes four different breakfast pizzas, including the Carne (two eggs, any style, Italian meats, mozzarella, no sauce), Verde (two eggs, any style, fresh grilled vegetables, mozzarella, no sauce), the Classic NY Brunch (bacon, egg, cheese) and the BLT (bacon, lettuce, fresh tomatos, tomato sauce, no cheese).
- Donatella offers ‘Hangover Pizza’ (made with buffalo mozzarella, sausage, basil and egg) for brunch.
Pulino’s, located in NYC, is reputedly the nations first breakfast pizzeria. Nate Appleman (late of A16 in San Francisco and “The Next Iron Chef” Season 2) menus a variety of sweet and savory thin crust pizzas for breakfast including:
- Salsiccia: Sunnyside up eggs, house-cured sage-y breakfast sausage, bacon, and white cheddar makes for a salty, tangy, hearty pile of food
- Spinacci: Eggs, spinach, mascarpone, and grana
- The Frutta: These sweet-savory pizzas are a bit more unusual. Made with cinnamon, sugar, butter, roasted pears, and pecorino
- The Ottima: Ricotta with wild blueberry jam and bacon
- Funghi: Eggs with mushrooms, pancetta, mascarpone and grana
- Bianca Tradizionale: Mozzarella, percorino, black pepper and pork strutto
- Margherita: tomato, mozzarella, grana and basil
Small pizzas are priced from $6.00 to $9.00. Large pizza’s are priced from $10.00 to $16.00. Chef Appleman’s offerings are admittedly a step up from the day-old leftovers most of us reheat at home.
Even Top 500 Chains are getting in on the act. The new Domino’s unit in Dayton, Ohio is offering a breakfast pizza featuring eggs and cheese on a pizza crust for $7.99. The price covers up to three toppings, and recommended combinations include ham and bacon; sausage, onions and jalapeños; and onion, green pepper and mushrooms. The breakfast pizza is offered all day. The morning menu also includes coffee and orange juice. The Domino’s in Dayton is the only U.S. branch of the chain to stay open 24 hours a day.
When it comes to breakfast away from home during the week, “portability” and “convenience” are often top of mind for today’s foodservice consumers. The Technomic “The Breakfast Consumer Trend Report 2009” showed 48% of consumers skipped breakfast during the week (as opposed to the weekend) because they didn’t have time. This explains in large part the popularity of breakfast sandwiches: 77% of consumers indicated they always/most times/sometimes purchase breakfast sandwiches when they purchase breakfast away from home during the week. The inherent portability and convenience of individual-sized pizza or pizza slices plays directly to these consumer needs. Technomic’s recent “The Pizza Consumer Trend Report 2010” revealed that:
- 30% of consumers say that they would be highly likely to order individual-sized pizzas if these options were available;
- 22% of consumers say that they would like portable, handheld pizza snacks to be more widely available;
This suggests that consumers would welcome new pizza offerings that were smaller and could be taken easily to go. If more pizza operators offered small pizzas, or a wider range of pizza-by-the-slice items that would be securely packaged to go, they could perhaps see increased traffic during the breakfast daypart.
