Breakfast House早点见面 — Restaurant in Austin

UPDATE - They offer much more than breakfast here now. New dishes can be best summarized as classic comfort chinese cooking. This restaurant is the real deal for simple home cooked dishes, different from the typical restaurant style. Growing up in a Chinese American household, these dishes are all nostalgic to me. Impressed with the food, we caved in and went for the gift certificate offer so I have had the chance to review several dishes. They also offer frozen dumplings and baos, which I have yet to try. The family that runs the restaurant is very friendly and provides quick service.

Chinese Salad Beef & Vegetables - The sliced beef is nicely spiced and tender, noodles perfectly bouncy. Cucumbers, carrots, and wood ear mushrooms for crunch. Comes with a soy and sesame blend paste that can run a bit salty so mix slowly to taste.

Spicy Combination Beef -The beef slices are a bit thick but the beef is still tender, a blend of tendon within each slice. Comes with tripe. Heavy on the mala chili flavor. If you order this to go, they drench the beef in the chili sauce.

Sour Cabbage & Pork Sparerib Soup - Comes with a fried pancake. There are clear noodles in the soup. Plenty of cabbage and a good portion of pork. The pickled soup base does make the vegetable too sour when eaten on its own, pair with a carb.

Spareribs & String Beans - Comes with a fried pancake. Served as a stew with clear noodles. Soup base is deeply savory and the green beans absorb the flavors without disintegrating. Pork was fork tender and well braised.

Chicken Mushroom - Comes with a fried pancake and clear noodles. Stew is almost like a gravy in terms of taste. Mushrooms were over cooked, becoming almost mush. The stew can be taken home and repurposed as a base for stir fry.

Wonton Soup - Light but umami forward soup. Meat filled little chewy wontons. Simple, light, satisfying.

Some dishes can be overloaded with flavor when eaten alone and need rice to balance out. Overall - dishes can be a bit pricey for the amount you get. Yet the quality and menu offering are a blessing for the North Austin area. Coupled with the family run mom and pop service, this place is a gem. They have cold dishes and the buns up front for easy take away. The weekends are usually packed up until the early afternoon. ——————

Very busy for Saturday lunch- chaotic front of house service. They were trying to fulfill takeout orders and take orders at the same time while getting people seated. Looked like many people place to go orders in person. You need to put your name on the ipad they have to get a place in line for dining in. They have some cold appetizers up front with the tofu hua (breakfast) can be ordered immediately. On the other hand, service is super slow for dine in, the breakfast concept is supposed to imply speed but we placed our order and waited at least 20 minutes for the food to be served. Some of the items we ordered are supposed prepared in advance so I’m assuming the kitchen is still trying to work on efficiency since this place is relatively new. Ordered the hot sweet soy milk- lightly sweet and thick (big bowl portion), egg and chive pancakes- very juicy chive forward filling and nice crisp chewy pancake, pork and beef with soy sauce- tender balanced well with the sauce (preferred pork to beef as beef was a bit tough) , tofu soup (dou fu hua)- average/lacking flavor but soft tofu. Verdict- disorganized service but good...

Great Taiwanese breakfast- will come back when in Austin

Breakfast House. It was everything I wanted it to be.

After a bit of confusion on ordering (no waiter to take your order, it is done online through the QR website) we ended up ordering:

Chinese doughnuts: slightly dense but very crispy, quite delicious with the sweetened soy milk.

Chive pancake: also a bit dense and not as flaky as others I’ve had but full flavor and great with the chili oil.

Beans and eggplant: delicious, crisp beans and perfectly cooked eggplant.

Beef noodle soup: the beef was delicious and tender and the broth was amazing if just a slight bit salty (but that may just be me)

Chive, shrimp and pork dumplings: great and delicious with the vinegar dip it comes with.

Mapo tofu: delicious standard fare, slightly numbing and spicy. Went well with rice.

Spicy fried fish: my favorite of what we got. Crisp batter with Szechuan peppercorn make this slightly spicy and surprisingly numbing and salted perfectly.

The rice was a bit more al dente than I like. The chili oil wasn’t too spicy but had good numbingness. Water jug was refilled quickly when emptied.

I’ll be more adventurous with what we order next time we...

Def need better signage at the front and at the tables. We stood in line for 10 minutes before being told we could seat ourselves for dine-in. There were also no instructions at the tables on how to order; luckily we knew to order by QR code but we saw some patrons just sitting there waiting for a server and eventually just leaving after no one came around.

Service is def a problem. No silverware, napkins, water offered after sitting down at the table. We had to ask multiple times to get chopsticks and eventually just got our own napkins. The servers must have no ticketing system because they will come around with the wrong dishes and ask tables if they ordered certain dishes.

Food itself was not bad and came out hot. Some items were sold out already by 10am. If you're looking for Taiwanese style breakfast, you might be disappointed as this is more Chinese cuisine.

Would recommend giving them some time to work out the kinks before coming. Btw, they've been offering a free soy milk drink for leaving reviews, so take that into consideration when reading through...