Meet Egg Shop’s Mouthwatering, Reimagined Breakfast Sandwich
No one—least of all first-time restaurant owners Sara Schneider and her husband Demetri Makoulis—could have predicted what a fly-away success Egg Shop would become. When they opened the 32-seat spot in Nolita in 2014 with Nick Korbee (formerly the executive chef at Smith & Mills in Tribeca), they just wanted to open an eatery dedicated to the ingredient they were most obsessed with: eggs. Two-and-a-half years later, Egg Shop is an Instagram sensation with a celebrity following (Aziz Ansari, Gigi Hadid, and Karlie Kloss all love it). Now, Korbee can add one more feather to his cap—author—as Egg Shop: the Cookbook came out last week.
“It’s how to do all the egg cooking that you could possibly wanna do, that you’ve been afraid you’ve been fucking up for too long,” Korbee says, when I stopped by to get the scoop. “So, secrets and mysteries revealed in a funny way.” Schneider adds, “It’s rethinking the way we look at eggs and what we can do with them, including breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
The key to their success lies partly in the versatility of the humble ingredient they’ve chosen to celebrate. Korbee’s menu spans the spectrum of eating—from healthy (grain-and-egg bowls) to hedonistic (their signature B.E.C.)—but the sandwich that most intrigued me is Korbee’s Brooklyn-inspired spin on the classic bagel with cream cheese and smoked fish, composed of a house-made everything biscuit (pure genius!), smoked whitefish (or lox), a sunnyside-up egg, tomato, dill, and horseradish cream: Egg Shop’s Every to Me. “The intro to that recipe is just a parody of the Notorious B.I.G. song Juicy,” Korbee says. “It’s like if he made himself the most Jew-tastic whitefish egg sandwich, that’s what it’d be.” After tasting it, this Jew approved.
Make it at home—and impress your friends with your newfound biscuit-baking skills—using this easy-to-execute recipe excerpted from the book. And stay tuned because they’re opening a Williamsburg location early this summer, so those of you—like myself—who are too lazy to make their own biscuits can roll out of bed and get your egg-tastic brunch on.
Photos by Jane Bruce.