Blame It on the Bossa Nova

I'm on a brunch jag.

For the third time in a week, I accepted a brunch invitation, this time choosing Aziza's on Main because in the five plus years they've been open, I'd never eaten anything but lunch and dinner there.

Exiting the car in front of 2113 Bistro directly across the street, I noticed their sign advertising a bossa nova brunch, but stayed true to Aziza's anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I love me some bossa nova, but once committed, you have to follow through. As luck would have it, they had a theme of their own going, playing a solid '80s soundtrack.

It began with Mister Mister's "Broken Wings," a song my date guessed as '90s, but which I was certain was '80s ('85, to be exact). His problem was that he couldn't remember what he was doing when the song was big and that's always key when you try to recall a song's year.

The brunch menu was pretty straightforward with few flourishes, but I happily settled on the Lebanese scramble with bits of London broil and onion while my fellow eater decided to take the measure of a brunch spot by ordering the sausage gravy biscuit.

Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" naturally brought up MTV and the ubiquitous video that even had toddlers singing, "chicks for free."

Not much better was Steve Perry's "Oh, Sherrie," another played to death video of the era, one that might as well have been a Journey song.

And we all know how I feel about Journey.

Our food arrived from two directions, his from the huge wood-burning oven in the back and mine from the kitchen, spurring me to ask our brightly-clad server what was up.

In an attempt to speed up brunch service, they have different stations, some front and some back and over easy eggs come from the oven in the back while my scrambled are handled up front.

Hey, you don't find out stuff unless you ask and I'm anything but shy about asking.

I liked my meat and onion studded eggs (could have used more butter on my toast, but when isn't that the case?) and my date's fried eggs were perfectly executed, runny yolks and all, so sopping ensued.

Difficult as it was for me to turn down dessert of Aziza's cream puff, I did, but only because I have dinner plans and a girl's got to stop eating at some point...if only so she can do it again later.

We detoured to Union Market afterwards, where I ran into a favorite sous chef and his honey picking up a few goodies in between moving in to a house on the Hill today.

They were all smiles about their move.

At the register, I was surprised to see the smiling and dimpled face of the hard-hitting drummer I'd just seen at Balliceaux the other night, who admitted he'd had to ice his arm after that show.

He'd also noticed that I'd dipped out before the last song and called me on it, forcing me to admit that after an evening that had spanned eight hours and multiple destinations, I'd finally gotten tuckered out.

Honestly, I needed to go home and get some sleep so I could get up and go to brunch the next morning. All this morning eating is exhausting.