What To Do In Port Jeff: #98 – Eat Toast, See Art

is the quirky coffeehouse on East Main Street that serves up some very satisfying breakfast meals while giving you the best in local art to view right from your seat.

Siddling up to the Hawaiian Coast Quesadilla Breakfast Burrito and the Green Apple and Cinnamon Pancakes on the menu are layer upon layer of french toasts with names like Brioche, Apple Strudel and Graham Cracker Crusted. (That last one comes with peanut butter, banana and caramel sauce.)

Most breakfast places these days offer a variation of the standard art viewing:

• Oil paintings of a country farmhouse in its environs (hokey.)
• Farm animals in various states of bliss before they ended up on your plate (depressing.)
• Old photographs of unknown urban places in some state of decay but its in black-and-white so it’s ok (yawn.)
• The somewhere-between-Nineteen-Eighty-and-Nineteen-Eighty-Seven-abstact-art-poster within a black frame (if you wait long enough everything comes back in style, right?)

Not Toast.

The artistry in the kitchen is challenged only by the artwork on the wall. Every month a brand new collection of artwork from some currently working local artist adorns its walls, brought to you by FRESH.

FRESH, according to the Toast website, “is an in-flux art collective dedicated to underground and emerging artists on Long Island.”

You’ll find everything from sculpture to painting with Pop, Abstract and Surrealistic influences on the walls. Shows take different tacks like the Halloween influenced (which ironically means fear of long words) group show to the tongue-in-cheek designs in the show by graphic designer Ben Owen.

At the MOMA, they'd scream like Edvard Munch before they let you to chow down on a Crunchy French Toast with raspberry sauce and sliced banana slathered down with real maple syrup mere inches from their modern art collection.

Only Toast and FRESH dare make the gastronomic marriage to the postmodernism possible.

Category: Art/Food

Price: Varies. See menu for food pricing. Most artwork is for sale.

Season: All year.

Note: Good for the body and the soul.