Ten things to love # 7: Bloody Marys and pretty much everything else about breakfast at Cafe Madison

As a writer, I look to M.F.K Fisher for inspiration. But today I’m more inclined toward Ernest Hemingway. For one thing, I was up all night and am now in a blurry-eyed fog. Short sentences are about all I can handle. For another, it is 10:38 am, and I am drinking.

A Bloody Mary to be exact. And a fine one, as these things go.

I had high-minded intentions when I started my trek over to Cafe Madison. (And us New Yorkers all know where those will get you.) I wanted to take a picture of the cafe's Blood Mary, so I could add it to my list of how to get your best friend to move to Albany.

I took said best friend here on Sunday for breakfast, and, after three sips of her Blood Mary and a bite of a raspberry–oatmeal pancake, she started wondering out loud if she should narrow her house search to places within walking distance of the café.

I have another friend from Boston (a town that's got plenty of nice breakfast places) who insists on coming to Café Madison every time she visits. She usually gets the crepes and eats them slowly while trying to figure out if it is possible to commute from Albany to her job.

I was a little worried back in the fall that some how the magic was fading. I visited the cafe a couple of times and everything was just a little off.

The normally impeccable service was rocky, the home fries undercooked and tasteless, even the bread didn’t seem right. Friends who live around the corner told me they'd stopped going because things weren’t as good as they used to be.

(One note, we are talking about Café Madison standards here: perfect eggs, fresh-baked bread, wonderful service, etc. The mark is higher for a place that has been that good for that long. When I bounced through Albany for a year when I was 15, the Pine Hills Café, as everyone called it then, was the place to go.)

Thankfully, the last few times I’ve gone things have been back to the old standards, and my friends have left with real-estate listings in their eyes.

But something else happened on Sunday. I tasted my friend’s Blood Mary and decided that my lifetime aversion to breakfast alcohol had been misguided at best. My dad drinks Blood Marys and I’ve been taking “just one sip” for years, trying to understand why one would do such things to a perfectly good glass of tomato juice. Never figured it out until Sunday.

I was wrong. So, so wrong. Ok, not exactly Eliot Spitzer-level, I-must now-apologize-to-every-New-Yorker-and their mothers-and their-Chihuahuas wrong. But still.

So last night I made plans to wander over and snap a picture or two. And then I went to bed and couldn't stop thinking about Eliot Spitzer. (I realize how this sounds, but I assure you my thoughts were purely political.) And so it was that I was fading off to sleep when I heard a crash and a cry. One of the twins had just woken up with the flu and let's just say it got worse from there.

When I woke this morning -- if that is what you can call rising from the spot on the soaked carpet next your child's bed where you passed out about an hour ago -- all my thoughts of productive work and politics were lost in a stinky haze. I wondered if the rest of New York felt as raked-over -- or had as crazy-bad hair -- as I did.

There are days when you want to sink into the moment, press your hands in grateful prayer and embrace the now. You know, get all Elizabeth Gilbert and everything. This was not going to be one of them. This seemed like a good morning to drink. Pictures, smicktures.

Here is the one picture I managed to take of the food.

Sorry, I will do better next time. I've been a little, uhhh. Yeah.

Until then you will have to take my word for the fact that the thin-egg-never-a-bit-of-brown omelets are…let's see, I need some hyperbolic word here. Oh, wait a minute, we are suppose to be in Hemingway land, are we not? OK, put it this way, the earth doesn't quite move, but it is close.