At OEB, we’ve always believed breakfast is worth doing differently. But sometimes, pushing breakfast forward starts with getting the classics exactly right.
In 2025, three of our most popular dishes were also three of our most familiar. Guests ordered 186,241 Classic Breakfasts, 129,610 Threesomes and 118,755 Traditional Bennys. That’s more than 434,000 orders of dishes built around breakfast staples people already know and love.
For a restaurant known for taking a creative approach to breakfast, those numbers got us thinking: what makes a familiar breakfast worth coming back for?
For OEB CEO Dave Orsten, it starts with getting the simplest things right.
“Something doesn’t need to be complicated to be special. Sometimes the simplest food is the hardest place to differentiate yourself because the guest already knows exactly what it should taste like. There’s nowhere to hide with eggs, bacon, potatoes and toast.”
Why Simple Breakfast Food Is So Hard to Get Right
There’s a unique challenge that comes with serving a classic breakfast. Everyone already knows what it’s supposed to taste like. Eggs, bacon, potatoes, and toast come with a lifetime of reference points. There aren’t unfamiliar flavours or elaborate presentations to distract from what’s on the plate.
Instead, the details have to do the work. The quality of the ingredients. How the eggs are cooked. The crispness of the bacon. The seasoning on the potatoes. The consistency from one visit to the next. It makes familiar breakfast food one of the clearest tests of a restaurant’s fundamentals.
And while roughly two-thirds of OEB guests lean toward familiar, approachable dishes, that doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in trying something new. The same guest who orders a Classic Breakfast today might choose something completely unexpected on their next visit. That’s why, at OEB, we’ve never viewed familiarity and innovation as opposites.
Breakfast Innovation Doesn’t Have to Mean Unfamiliar
Our brown butter hollandaise is one of the clearest examples. Hollandaise is a breakfast staple, especially when it comes to eggs benedict. Instead of replacing something guests already knew and loved, our culinary team started with that familiar foundation and made it distinctly OEB. Today, brown butter hollandaise has become one of the flavours guests most closely associate with us.
“To me, that is innovation at its best,” Dave says. “It doesn’t need to be unfamiliar or complicated. It needs to make the food better and give people a reason to come back.”
That same philosophy gives us room to explore more unexpected ingredients, too. Truffle, caviar, smoked salmon and duck have all found a place on OEB menus, giving guests an opportunity to experience breakfast differently. But the classics have an equally important job. They establish trust.
“If we’re going to put truffle or caviar on the menu and talk about pushing breakfast forward, we had better also be able to cook a great egg, make exceptional potatoes and serve a benny consistently.”
So, What Makes a Great Breakfast?
After 17 years of serving breakfast, one lesson has become increasingly clear.
“Innovation can get someone’s attention, but quality, craveability and consistency are what earn their trust and bring them back,” Dave says.
More than 434,000 orders of three familiar OEB breakfast dishes tell us the same thing. Great breakfast doesn’t always need to be reinvented. Sometimes, it means taking something people already know and love, choosing great ingredients, bringing the same culinary thinking to it that you would something entirely new, and executing it exceptionally well.
Because pushing breakfast forward doesn’t have to mean leaving the classics behind. Sometimes, it means raising the standard for what a classic can be.
