Sometimes you enjoy your meal so much you forget about the bill as it lies in wait, ready to drain all the pennies from your pocket. When you get the check, you frown, but realize the food is worth the price. Usually you have no complaints; you might be mad at yourself, but that’s all.

Well, that didn’t happen to The Biscuit after breakfast at Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe last week. The bill came, and it read: $10.24 (excluding $2 tip) for one pecan waffle, one egg, two slivers of bacon and a coffee.

This time, the restaurant is getting the blame for upsetting its diner.

Now there are plenty of extremely overpriced dishes out there. Even in Chapel Hill, eateries like Bin 54 will really set you back many, many bucks. But there is something peeving about charging so much for the most basic ingredients you can find in a kitchen. How can a few restaurant nuts cost double the price of a nut candy bar?

Obviously you have to cover your expenses, but breakfast is a cheap meal to make, and there are dozens of joints around, like Country Junction, Walt’s Grille, EB’s, Time Out, where you can get it for next to nothing. Even at a more haute, if you will, establishment like Elmo’s, you really can pay less and get more than at Waffle Shoppe.

Considering the above, The Biscuit decided to do a cost analysis of the pecan waffle combo at Waffle Shoppe. This was far from a scientific study, and the Shoppe might not offer the most overpriced breakfast around. Also, it’s not a commentary on flavor - breakfast is breakfast. Still, it’s worth examining how deserved your frustration is when you hand over so much money for so little (you’ll see in a minute) food. Waffle Shoppe, no matter how many culprits exist out there, is taking the flack this time.

Before scrutinizing the breakfast joint, though, The Biscuit had to determine a standard to which to compare Waffle Shoppe. The likely candidate, which also has a similar Tudor moniker, is Durham’s Waffle House off Highway 54.

Using Waffle House makes sense because the food should be standard nationwide. One could argue the eatery can purchase ingredients cheaper as a chain, but this one is independently owned and, still – at the least The Biscuit would consider – almost expensive for breakfast (not counting the outlier: hotel buffets).

So, first, let’s break down the $10.23 receipt.

The bulk of the order consisted of a $6.40 helping of a foot-or-so circumference waffle, a single (isn’t two standard?) scrambled egg that had not fluffed up and two thin pieces of bacon that tangled together to form a floppy pork belly helix. The most aggravating ingredient was the $1.40 dash of pecans. Coffee, for $1.65, rounded out the order, but at least that was all-you-could-drink.

Waffle House, on the other hand, offered all that and more for a total (with tax) of $9.15. The All-Star Special included a pecan waffle; not one, but two eggs; two thick slabs of bacon; coffee; and then toast and a heaping plop of grits. And if that doesn’t convince you finding a better value is easy, check out the next part.

Weight analysis. This really showed The Biscuit that there was reason to be angry with the Waffle Shoppe bill.

For $10.23, The Biscuit got 8.64 ounces, about half a pound of food, not including the coffee, at the Shoppe. For more than a dollar cheaper, Waffle House served up 21.2 ounces – almost one and a half pounds – of breakfast. Take away the grits and toast, and there are still nearly 4 more ounces of food in the Waffle House meal.

But here’s what really irks The Biscuit – the pecans. The fun (not really) part was separating them from the waffle, which involved sucking off the cooked batter, spitting them onto a scale. They cost $1.40 at the Shoppe, and you’ll get roughly 1.1 ounces of the nut; yet for only 45 cents, you can get 1.8 ounces of pecans at Waffle House. Why?

Let’s make some large generalizations to explain why the difference between the two prices is upsetting. Most restaurateurs follow the rule that the actual cost of an ingredient should make up about 30 percent of the item’s menu cost. In this case, that number could be an even lower percentage because neither of these establishments offers fancy cuts of meat or caviar.

Assume that because Waffle House pecans are so much cheaper than those at the Shoppe even though they are still the same product, the former eatery must be keeping prices as low as it possibly can while still covering costs. That means the pecans, about 1.8 ounces of them, cost the House about 13 cents (0.13($) / 0.3 of menu price = 0.45($)).

Taking this as the relative base rate price for pecans, then these nuts cost the restaurants about 7 cents an ounce. According to the USDA, retail pecans last year went for about $1.50 per pound, or 8 cents an ounce, so the Waffle House price makes sense.

If Waffle Shoppe faces the same prices – 8 cents an ounce – then 1.1 ounces of pecans should cost them roughly 10 cents. If they charge $1.40 for that amount, they are making $1.30 off the customer, which means the nut’s actual cost accounts for only 7 percent of the menu price, much less than the 30 percent standard.

Phew, lots of numbers, and this may not be a rigorous proof, but you should get the idea. There is a discrepancy between pricing at both locations, and one of them, Waffle Shoppe, seems to be earning much more from their patrons.

The Shoppe must have it’s reasons, but when you get much more of the same exact thing, arguably better tasting, at other places for even cheaper, why bother going there? Some Shoppe servers are nice, and it’s a quick jaunt from campus, but that’s about it. The food is nothing more than mediocre. They don’t take credit cards either, which is an inconvenience these days.

Bottom line is, to reiterate, breakfast is breakfast. Unless you’re getting farm-fresh ingredients or fancy cheese, there is absolutely no reason to pay exorbitant prices for a meal that’s cheap to make. Save the money and go get a more filling lunch.

Maybe Waffle House was a bad comparison, but the food from the Durham one was actually excellent, especially relative to other franchise locations. The bacon was bulky and crisp all the way through; the grits were nice and buttery; the waffle was truly, definitely better than its counterpart.

If you have bad memories of the big yellow sign and waiters with paper hats, though, here’s what The Biscuit advocates for breakfast: Go to Elmo’s during the weekday before 11:30, get two biscuits, sausage gravy, two eggs, bacon and grits for $5.50, and you will get full. You will enjoy each bite. You won’t be mad when the bill comes.

Farewell, Gourmet. After nearly 70 years, Conde Nast will stop publishing the magazine.

The Biscuit thought it was important to mark the event because of how Gourmet affected this blog’s perception of eating in Chapel Hill.

Four years ago, The Biscuit came down to Chapel Hill from Boston expecting to find nothing more for food than greasy pizza and stale biscuits.

On the second day here, however, an issue of Gourmet caught The Biscuit’s eye in the grocery store’s checkout aisle. The cover lauded the best 50 restaurants in America, one of which, The Biscuit surely thought, had to be in Boston.

Boston did have one; The Triangle had two.

Seeing that Lantern and Magnolia Grill had made the list let The Biscuit know his four years here would not be a culinary disappointment. Soon, he’d be eating everywhere he could in the area.

Check out a eulogy for the magazine in the New York Times written by the publisher of Cook’s Illustrated, Christopher Kimball. Besides remembering Gourmet for what it was, he offers an intriguing criticism of journalism’s current ailing business model.

Lastly, The Dorm Cook, a new blog about dorm room dining at UNC, broke the news. Give them a peek.

R.I.P.

For your weekend viewing pleasure, The Biscuit thought it might be valuable to throw up a little more content to go with Jordan’s coffee tasting.

Here are a few of his interesting notes, things he said, images he composed, after being on the brew for a few hours (click to blow them up and enjoy):

Hooray. The Biscuit is back in Chapel Hill and ready to eat. After a somewhat disappointing culinary experience in New York, where the ratio of bad restaurants to good ones was much higher than you’d expect, the eating opportunities in the Triangle are quite exciting. Plenty of places that opened over the summer are calling to be tried, and The Biscuit has yet to visit plenty of places that have always been around.

The first post of the semester needs to be fun, though, so we’re going to celebrate a special occasion in any person’s life: the first time he tries coffee. And in our subject’s case, he’s waited 21 years for that first sip.

Meet Biscuit friend Jordan Wingate, whose face has sometimes graced this site. A vegetarian, Jordan likes to stay in shape and eat healthy; he said he had no reason to drink coffee. All of his peers, however, have caffeine, not blood, flowing through their veins. They need it to survive their spasmodic schedules, and they insisted Jordan was missing out.

The Biscuit was also eager to hear an untainted opinion pick the cup of joe he liked the most; Jordan had no idea what coffee was supposed to taste like.

So The Biscuit and friends took the virgin out for coffee one Sunday afternoon (turns out anytime before 7 a.m. is a bad time to have your first seven cups of coffee).

We wanted to give Jordan an assortment of some popular as well as some unexpected Chapel Hill java-joints, so we chose Caffe Driade, McDonald’s, Starbuck’s, Time Out, Weaver Street Market, Open Eye and a pink house on Mallette Street where Jordan lives so he could have some homebrew. Yes, there are more cafes, but they were probably closed, and we felt bad when we realized the damaged we’d inflicted making him intake so much caffeine.

At each place, Jordan enjoyed at least half a cup of coffee black, then with cream, then with cream and sugar, after which we asked his opinion and took his pulse. Although his aerobic excellence is evident from his resting heart rate, we still got an idea of what a shock coffee can be to an unsullied system.

To view his expectations going into the celebration, let’s begin with the last footage ever recorded of Jordan before he had his inaugural cup of coffee. In the same clip we’ll also see his reaction to the first sip. (Sorry the camera didn’t take high-quality video. Just appreciate the audio.)

After that cup, we were off, scurrying to get the man of the hour as many drinks as would fit in his stomach.

We asked Jordan to take notes during the experience, which The Biscuit overlaid on this nifty chart where you can mouse-over each heart rate to see what thoughts were going through his head during each cup:

In the end, surprisingly or not, Jordan was neutral on the drink.

He decided he preferred coffee with cream, no sugar, because “the liquid [cream] neutralized the flavor while masking the bitterness with a sweet smell.” He decided Time Out, the worst brewer, had to try a different blend. He decided that Caffe Driade served the best cup overall. And he decided he was never going to drink coffee ever again. He couldn’t understand why anyone would.

What happened next was surprising, to The Biscuit atleast.

Of course, it takes several experiences with coffee before any one decides he likes the drink. One day you just want it.

But we went about it the wrong way, overwhelming our poor guinea pig with so much caffeine. The substance shocked his system so much he could only have negative memories about coffee. It wasn’t until The Biscuit received an angry call from Jordan’s mother did it become apparent the test subject was in trouble.

“Do you have any what this will do to him?” she asked. “He will be up for days.”

Young, yet experienced coffee drinkers don’t normally worry when they have a shot or two of espresso after dinner, so we weren’t initially concerned. Then he started acting strangely, writing nonsense down, drawing inappropriate pictures, singing out-of-tune songs, running into walls. Here’s an example (as it was starting to get bad. He later threw uncooked kale into the marinara sauce):

Then Jordan did not fall asleep for nearly 30 hours after his last cup.

Just to share his agony, he made sure to send The Biscuit a text message every hour throughout the night.

• (1:45 am) I’m not happy. Expect to hear how unhappy I am every hour until sunrise
• (2:39 am) =/
• (3:04 am) :((
• (4:24 am) =))))
• (5:21 am) Sun will be rising soon. Yes sir it will
• (6:01 am) Six am. A bird twitters gloriously outside
• (7:59 am) Buttercup, wake up

Well, The Biscuit got good sleep.

When the city gets a little overwhelming, The Biscuit needs a reminder of home. Not much else can do that better than some good barbecue. There’s plenty of it around New York, as the area’s seen a recent craze for smoked and sauced-up meat. As good as it gets, though, none of it has that authentic flavor. To truly please the taste buds, only the real thing will do.

Cue (ha) Ed Mitchell. The owner of The Pit in Raleigh saved the day this summer when he headed north to participate in the Barbecue Block Party in Madison Square Park. Mitchell showed fourteen other pitmasters how it’s done in North Carolina, and he did it more authentically than anyone.

Of all the participants, many of whom hail from barbecue-averse regions, Mitchell brought the flavors of his home with him. From handing out thin crispy chips of skin, crackling (way better than hunks of chicharron The Biscuit bit through in Brooklyn the same way you’d crush a chicken bone), to talking to the people waiting in the hour-long lines, the Wilson, N.C. native wanted to please the attendees with the real deal.

“We just try to show people all about the food. Barbecue is having fun, the cooking, the eating, the experience, the smell, the sound,” Mitchell said.

For the event, Mitchell and his crew drove their effigy-covered bus through the night from Raleigh to Manhattan. At 5 p.m. the day before the weekend-long festival, they placed 190-pound pigs over a mix of hickory, oak and charcoal in massive mobile smokers. Twelve hours later, as the sun rose, they were up making sure the batch was finished, then chopping the loads of it up. Lots of work, but it sure paid off.

The meat had a very full, smoky flavor, not like the bland, chewy matter covered up with sweet sauce a lot of places above the Mason-Dixon serve. Charred bits brought a little crunch, and the fresh, adequately-mayoed cole slaw added a complementary crispiness. A little Eastern-style dressing on top completed the treat.

After enjoying the much-loved and much-missed meal, The Biscuit had to tell Mitchell that no one in city was doing it like him. We also had to find out what he thought about every one else there.

“Frankly, I am really stuck on Carolina barbecue,” Mitchell said. “It’s the original, what represents it. I might be a little biased, but it’s what I grew up with.”

There’s no bias. Until people in the North growing up loving barbecue the way Mitchell did, they’ll have to travel south for a decent bite of meat. The Biscuit will heading to The Pit come August.

It took a misinformed New York Times article to bring The Biscuit back to life, but before, here’s some explaining.

After a deep breath, here it goes:

Yes, The Biscuit has been gone for sometime. You might have even considered this site stale, and you’d be right if you did. Short story is that school gets in the way, but the same hardwork got The Biscuit a job in Manhattan this summer, so celebrate. There will be almost too many eating opportunties and experiences to share.

It’s going to be difficult to keep this site super updated with a real job and being away from Chapel Hill. So we’re going to stray away a little from the norm and talk about New York dining when we can. But every post will hopefully be a comparison between eating in the North and South.

For example, barbecue (BBQ, they call it here) is super popular up in NYC, but they don’t exactly know what they’re doing even when they call it NC style. One guide book says that a place here has shrimp and grits as good as, quote, Crooks Corner in Chapel Hill, where the dish was originally developed. Get the idea? Finding the parallels will be fun.

For now, let’s start with sharing a quick article from the NY Times courtesy of Biscuit friend, the Muffin, that suggests what to do if you have 36 hours in the Triangle.

Overall, it seems like a decent itinerary when there’s too little time to see it all. Surprisingly, they didn’t mention Lantern, which every foreigner seems to be in the habbit of bring up now.

While it might be in Durham, it’s close enough and good enough to praise the paper for mentioning Taqueria La Vaquita, though they missed the wonderful quail in mole sauce - one of the most delicious things in the whole area.

The Biscuit has to disagree with the Chapel Hill choice of Mama Dip’s though, where we’ve yet to eat anything above average. Longtime residents will always tell you how it good it used to be. Can’t people move on? Seems a little bit like the reporters got all their info from word-of-mouth, not food-in-mouth.

Check the article out, and see what you think. Until next time, keep eating. The Biscuit has photos and videos and notes on dozens of eating experiences in Chapel Hill that will be here one day in the future.

February, right around now, happens to be The Biscuit’s birthday (the blog and the blogger, coincidentally). To celebrate, we thought we’d eat a whole load of cupcakes from the two boutique bakeries in town, Sugarland and Bliss, then figure out which we liked better.

Turns out, this was a true rumble, and picking a winner wasn’t easy.

From the start, with both costing more than $2 a pop, these desserts are a luxury we wouldn’t eat unless it was a special occassion. This time, however, was no normal day.

The Biscuit and friends came up with some judging criteria before sampling each treat: frosting, cake, appearance, flavor and creativity. We took each bite with these aspects in mind (which took a little fun out of the eating. By the fifth cupcake, however, eating wasn’t fun anymore.)

Let’s start with Sugarland, which has been around for about a year now. They brought the upscale cupcake concept to Chapel Hill after it had already been popular in bigger cities. The Biscuit originally thought paying the $3.25 for a cupcake was rediculous (it is), but everyonce in a while they’re a nice reward.

At first, Suglarland’s cupcake creations were normal, chocolate, vanilla, but they’ve really expanded into some pretty interesting concoctions. We decided to try triple chocolate, chocolate cake with banana cream filling, cream cheese-iced banana cake filled with nutella and strawberry shortcake. Not your average flavors.

Their competion came from the newcomer in Chapel Hill. Opening in the place of 3Cups, Bliss seemed like a gamble because, really, Chapel Hill ain’t big enough for two boutique bakeries. That’s where we in step in.

While Sugarland does a little bit of everything - cookies, coffee, gelato, cocktails, Bliss really focuses on the cupcake. They have a pretty cool system, too. They sell six regular flavors for $2.50, which are always on the menu, and then three daily specials, which rotate every week (Dulce de leche, orange-spice and oreo when we went, Thursday).

We thought we’d keep it consistent when choosing flavors from Bliss, so we got one with chocolate cake and an orange-spice to go against Sugarland’s strawberry shortcake and then a golden cake with chocolate ganache, which an employee said was their specialty.

Let’s talk about individual cupcakes first.

At Sugarland, the chocolate cake with banana cream really didn’t work. The filling was subtle and cold, you didn’t really know what you were eating. The cake can only be described as tasting dark. On the other hand, the banana nutella cupcake was probably the best of the night. The originality was superb and the combination of flavors just right. The cream cheese icing offered a nice break from the other cupcakes’ frosting, which you’ll see hurt Sugarland.

It was obvious why everyone’s favorite at Bliss was the yellow cake with chocolate ganache icing. The topping was just right, like the inside of a really good truffle, and it mixed well with the cake. The other two were both about as good as each other, solidly delicious treats.

Overall, there were some real differences between both bakeries.

Sugarland was willing to step out of the box and try all kinds of flavors. We had trouble choosing between all of them. (The chocolate malt still sounds good.) And they used the right ingredients for everything. The strawberry shortcake icing, which had real chunks of fruit, was probably the best flavor we had all night. You could taste the real vanilla and intense chocolate in most of the cupcakes.

Every one was pretty moist, though they were all so cold they had a texture that seemed like they were from the grocery store’s industrial refrigerator. Considering that, Sugarland baked up what seemed like the traditional cupcake, what we think of when we celebrate an elementary school birthday.

But then there was the frosting. This whole super-cold thing really screwed it up for Sugarland. By keeping their cupcakes nearly frozen, they got hard, especially the topping. Except for the cream cheese icing, every other cupcake’s frosting was so bad it was hard to enjoy it. The topping was solid, super sweet and gritty with sugar, absolutely exactly like eating a chunk of frozen toothpaste, really. Although the flavor was usually nice, the ratio between cake and topping was devestating because biting through the rock-hard icing compressed the cake into nothing. The Biscuit would have just separated the two and eaten each part individually. Perhaps if they sat out for a while, the icing might melt a little and become edible.

In the other corner, Bliss did everything pretty much right. The cake was super dense and moist, the frosting just enough to let you know it was there. The flavor was subtle but left a pleasant aftertaste. All in all, the bakery put out fundamentally sound creations that were easy to enjoy.

So who’s better?

If you’re going to go big and buy these lavish cupcakes, you probably want something exotic. Otherwise, you could go to the supermarket. In that case, try Sugarland. They have some really cool flavors that taste so good.

If, however, you want a straight-up well done cupcake, go to Bliss. They’ve pefected each piece of the cake to make it all work together.

Although it might seem like the easy way out, the choice is really up to the taster.

In truth, Bliss is cheaper, closer to where The Biscuit lives, and a little more fun to eat (no worry about icing), so that’s where we’ll be.

The Biscuit will be on on WCHL1360AM’s Side Dish radio show at 11 a.m. on Sunday, with a repeat the following Saturday at 11 a.m. Tune in to hear a little bit about eating in the area and about this blog. There’ll also be talk of a rotten dining experience in D.C. Fun.

Tomorrow we will settle the battle between the boutique cupcake creators in Chapel Hill, Bliss and Sugarland. Sweet.

If you want to please your valentine and support workers’ rights, stop by UNC’s Pit Thursday, Friday or Saturday from 11 to 2 p.m. and buy some chocolate.

The candy is fair trade, which means all sorts of good things. Proceeds go to Transfair USA. It tastes good, too.

Oh, and check out this guy, who is going on a rediculous diet to get six-pack abs. The Biscuit can tell you his method is kind of overkill.

Stomach still hurting, The Biscuit managed to write a story about the Krispy Kreme Challenge experience for the Daily Tar Heel.

Although it’s hard to erase the guilt of consuming 2,400 calories in less than 10 minutes, the event was so worth it.

In the end, The Biscuit came in 14th out of 5,000+ people. That’s a lot better than expected. Here’s how The Biscuit did:

- Total time to complete challenge: 33:05 (1st place was 29:57)

- First 2 miles: 12:44

- Total doughnut eating time: 6:05 (Fastest was 1:44, geez)

- Second 2 miles: 14:23

Next year, we’ll work on the doughnut eating time. While it was faster than most, the split needs to drop to have a chance at winning.

The best news of the whole event was that reportedly the fastest N.C. State rower finished in 37 minutes or more, which is at least 35 places behind The Biscuit. Next time, the State crew might practice a little harder before trash talking.

Here are some photos from the event, courtesy of Biscuit-friend Steven Chu.

If you want to see some eating action, check out these sites’ cool coverage:

WRAL
News & Observer
N.C. State Technician