If you’re going to Bongo Room, be prepared to wait. Waiting is part of the deal at Bongo Room. When we arrived at 10am on a Sunday morning there were 30 people standing outside and the wait was 45 minutes. The previous week six of us arrived at 11am and the wait was an hour and a half. The question, of course, is whether it’s worth the wait. Without mincing words, yes.
Bongo Room does more interesting things well with breakfast than any restaurant I have been to anywhere. Bongo Room is one of the true gems of Wicker Park.
Inside the green-tinted storefront, the décor is nothing to get excited about, sage walls are offset by exposed brick. Ochre tables and chairs are arranged on a hardwood floor. A long bar takes up half the length of one wall. But as soon as the menu lands in front of you, you know you are in for something special.
Wildly creative dishes present you with such a wide array of appealing choices that you know right away you are going to have to come back more than once to do justice to your adventurous spirit.
You will want to try berry and banana cheesecake flapjacks. Or sample white chocolate and caramel covered pretzel pancakes. The very idea of raspberry and Oreo flapjacks staggers the imagination. And that’s just the pancakes! The Bongo Room offers an impressive array of egg dishes as well, like spinach, roasted red pepper and feta benedict. Or rock shrimp, black bean and chorizo benedict.
It’s one thing for a kitchen to let its imagination run wild; it’s another thing to execute it. Bongo Room scores on both counts.
The benedicts are light and fluffy with perfectly poached eggs and a savory hollandaise sauce. The huevos rancheros have just the right kick, the kind that imparts a pleasant zing to a sip of hot coffee. And the chocolate tower french toast? Fuh-get about it. You will not be able to resist digging in to this beguiling stack of rich chocolate infused french toast bathed in a light maple cream sauce and topped with curlicues of shaved chocolate and bananas. The experience is nothing less than captivating.
The only place where Bongo Room falls short is with the potatoes, offering rather standard chunk style hashbrowns, but the rest of the food is so irresistible and so filling you will hardly miss them.
Everyone who has ever written about Bongo Room mentions the wait, so I thought I’d offer a few strategies to mitigate the pain. If there’s any way you can go during the week, do so. The weekends bring out-of-towners and brunch-junkies who are blessedly absent during the week. If you must come on the weekend, get there before 9:45am. After 10am, all bets are off. Hold your party to four or less. Parties of six or more are asking for trouble – the place just isn’t that big. The restaurant is really designed to deal with diners in pairs, and if things get really onerous, two diners can always belly up to the bar and cut the wait in half. And be advised, Bongo Room closes at 2pm, so don’t try to outwait the crowds.
If you’ve never been to Bongo Room, you owe it to yourself to go at least once. From time to time the crowds can cause the service to slip, the host often seems terse and put-upon, and the wait can seem grueling when you're hungry and jonesing for that first coffee of the day. After looking at your watch a few times you may be tempted to try some place else, but don’t be fooled into thinking that someplace else is just as good.
There’s nothing quite like Bongo Room. It’s the best breakfast in Wicker Park. It’s the best breakfast in the city. Heck, I challenge you to find a more inspired, better executed breakfast anywhere.
Bongo Room
1470 N. Milwaukee
773-489-0690 / Reservations Not Accepted
Hours: Breakfast, Brunch and Lunch: Weekends 9am-2pm; Weekdays 8am-2:30pm
Features: Brunch, Carryout
Avg Price of Meal for Two Including Tax $40
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