Trina's Starlite Lounge, Somerville, MA

Yesterday we woke up to the typical bareness that accompanies a winter holiday. The streets were deserted and the temperature of 15°F did not help it. We were considering a full day of movie-watching and procrastination when Diego remembered Trina's Starlite Lounge's Industry Brunch.

A couple of years ago the folks at the Starlite Lounge came to a striking realization. All those cooks, chefs, maitres d', servers, busboys who work the Sunday shifts can never enjoy the blissfulness of a Sunday brunch. To right this wrong, they have been offering Monday Industry brunches ever since. To top it all, their fried chicken has been named one of the 10 best fried chickens outside the South by Bonn Appetit Magazine.

The Starlite Lounge is a few blocks from our place, so we gathered our strengths and marched over there thinking we would waltz in, have some quick Southern-style brunch and be on our way back in no time. After all, the streets looked as if everyone had decided to stay in! Boy we were wrong. A large fraction of the Inmanite population seemed to have congregated at the Starlite Lounge. Maybe with the holiday many "industry outsiders" had shared our thoughts, or maybe the industry does come together here on Mondays. In any case, we were welcomed by a huge crowd and a one and a half hours of waiting time.

After exactly 1.5 hours we were sat. We waited another 20 minutes for service and then another 20 until our food reached the table. The servers (two for about 15 tables) were nice and even apologetic for the slow service as they were clearly overwhelmed. I won't go as far as to say that the meal was worth the wait, but it was certainly delicious.

Diego went with the fried chicken on buttermilk waffle with hot pepper syrup. I'm not a big fan of fried chicken (after all, chicken is chicken) but Diego devoured the whole thing almost without breathing and I have to admit that the syrup was highly original. It had a spicy aftertaste without being overtly strong or hot. Because he had chosen an atypical brunch meal, he did without the coffee, and ordered a Bloody Mary instead. Trina's Starlite Lounge is foremost a cocktails bar and they do seem to know their craft. The BM was perfectly spicy, not terribly thick and came with a cucumber (pickeld?) spear to cool one's mouth after the spiciness. All in all a perfect cocktail for brunch.

After Diego's decadence, I felt compelled to take a more minimalist approach. All the options looked delicious (a Cobb salad, a traditional two eggs-bacon-toast-hash breakfast, scrambled eggs, biscuits and gravy, a country benny -bagels instead of English muffin and over easy eggs instead of poached, and huevos rancheros) but as I have done many times before, I went with two sides instead a full plate: a fruit cup and a portion of sweet corn bread. I am of the idea that corn bread is the U.S. most important contribution to the culinary world, and the Starlite Lounge one was probably the best I've ever tried. It was golden and crusty on the outside and soft, crumbly and with whole kernels on the inside. It came with a scoop of sweet butter and it was a thing of beauty: it looked more like a desert than a side.

Clearly, this was something of a controversial brunch: fried chicken and corn bread are certainly far from eggs, bacon or salmon, but we did have coffee, OJ+GJ, fruit and Bloody Mary. Most importantly, the Starlite Lounge gave us a Sunday on a Monday, and that was the brunch spirit we needed to end a sad winter weekend on a high note.