Three Perfect Breakfasts in Metro Phoenix to Try Right Now

Sometimes a piece of avocado toast or a smoothie just won't cut it. You want a breakfast that will stick with you all day, haunting you with memories of the indulgent, deep satisfaction of a well-composed meal savored at a mealtime so often overlooked or underappreciated. When you're having this kind of soulful craving, these are three dishes that will get the job done.

Pineapple Hawaiian Bread French Toast at New Wave

Since last year, Country and Sergio Velador, the pair behind Super Chunk, that Old Town baked goods utopia famed for treats like mesquite chocolate chip cookies and super-addictive caramel corn, have been talking about expanding operations to include a dessert bar. Nine months later, they opened the New Wave Market, an 1,100-square-foot, light-filled cafe and marketplace adjacent to Super Chunk. The new breakfast menu features items like Country's fresh-baked sourdough bagels topped with fresh cream cheese and lox; a challah roll fried egg sandwich layered with thick-cut bacon and topped with fresh pesto; and a downright sultry French toast, made using pineapple Hawaiian bread topped with whipped mascarpone and fruit preserves.

Homemade Machaca Breakfast Scramble at El Horseshoe Restaurant

These days, almost all restaurants purchase their machaca beef pre-dried from a factory, but Angel Avitia Sr. instead bought his own dehydrators from Mexico and spends several days each week processing his own machaca meat. After being seasoned and left to dry for days, the jerky-like meat is shredded. When it’s ordered, either to be scrambled with eggs or potatoes for a breakfast plate next to beans and a chunk of salty cotija cheese; stuffed into burritos; or tossed with roasted vegetables for a taco filling, the shredded beef is heated in a pan with corn oil to give it enough moisture to bring the beef back to life, but not so much that it loses its signature chewiness.

Designer Doughnuts at Masterpiece Donuts & Coffee+

Tom and Sheri Schrader decided that there is nothing better than a fresh, warm doughnut with a great cup of joe, so they designed a fried-to-order, customized doughnut assembly line in their airy space (in the same complex as the newly opened Tacos Tequila Whiskey), which is not yet another franchise or mini-chain, but an honest-to-God, local indie one-off. There's an overwhelming number of combination options: The icings come in vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, maple, and glaze; the toppings are rainbow sprinkles, chopped peanuts, Oreo crumbles, miniature M&Ms, chocolate pearls, sea salt, graham cracker crumbs, or cinnamon sugar; and the drizzles can be vanilla, chocolate, marshmallow, caramel, cinnamon, raspberry, peanut butter, or espresso. For those who are less creative first thing in the morning or crippled with indecision when faced with such a massive number of options, the menu of predesigned doughnuts are really fun to choose from as well, like the Monet, a glazed doughnut, topped with sea salt, and drizzled with caramel; the Kahlo, iced with chocolate and drizzled with espresso; the Vermeer, a chocolate overload of icing, pearls, and drizzle; and the Pissarro, a vanilla-iced, graham-topped, cinnamon-drizzled doughnut.