This past Sunday a few of my girlfriends and I had a jam-packed day of events planned, and what better way to start off a Sunday than brunch?  We headed over to Longman & Eagle out in Logan Square.  Logan is an up and coming neighborhood in Chicago and is home to some of the hottest new restaurants where rent is reasonable and space is abundant.  I heard really great things about Longman & Eagle but knew that they don’t offer reservations and the wait is usually about an hour.  We weren’t surprised to hear our wait was one hour and 15 minutes, so we waited outside in this cute waiting area the restaurant had set up.  What the wait staff failed to tell us, which we discovered forty minutes into our wait, is that Longman & Eagle has a backbar, with open seating, pastries and drinks, called Off-Site Bar, which wasn’t crowded at all and served exactly what we were looking for: Bloody Mary’s.  The bloody mary was perfectly garnished with a beerback and cheddar & pickle stick.

Not long after we had discovered the off-site bar, we were called to our seats.  The inside of Longman & Eagle, a farm-to-table restaurant, looks like the mix of a farm house and a ski lodge.  Very quaint, cozy and with a mix and match of country chairs for the tables.  The menu was so hard to choose from with a variety of egg breakfast plates including salmon benedict, steak and eggs, omelets and quiche, and then soul food including sausage, gravy and biscuits, fried chicken & waffles, and pina colada french toast.

 I went with the salmon benedict and ended up ordering the mixed greens on the side.  When I was ordering, I saw that one of the menu items had fried plantains on the side and really wanted to get an order of those.  Disappointingly, this restaurant (or server) doesn’t customize much and I wasn’t able to try the plantains.  The Salmon Benedict was pretty decent, but I wish I ordered the breakfast potatoes on the side instead of the mixed greens, which had barely any taste to them.  

From my experience, along with my 9 other friends that were there with me, the soul food route is the way to go.  Multiple friends ordered the sausage biscuits and gravy and they loved it, where those that ordered the egg options weren’t as impressed. Stick to the soul food and remember the back bar on your visit to this restaurant my friends!