Best Brunch Spots to Take Your Mom in Every State

In this light-filled dining room with exposed brick walls, butcher-block tables, and orange metal chairs, the Southern-style brunch menu includes pickled shrimp with saltine crackers, cornmeal pancakes with cucumber cream cheese and trout roe, and fried oyster Benedict.

This popular downtown “breakfast all day” brunch spot, with walls brightened by the work of local artists (and an occasional moose strolling by outside), offers the usual pancakes, French toast, and egg dishes, but adds local flair with homemade smoked sockeye salmon cakes and eggs and a reindeer sausage scramble.

This “creative a.m. eatery” advertises “Arizona’s largest Bloody Mary bar” and touts its “crazy brunch menu.” All the usual brunch fare is offered, but so are such dishes as avocado toast “Hash style” (with bacon jam, braised pork, crispy leeks, green chili hollandaise, fried eggs, and, yes avocado) and carnitas hash (Coke-braised pork with potatoes, corn, avocado, cotija cheese, green chili sauce, and corn tortillas).

Chef Joël Antunes, who had his own highly regarded restaurants in Atlanta, London, and other cities before coming to Little Rock’s historic Capital Hotel, changes the menu in this comfortable dining room frequently. Currently, besides more expected brunch dishes, it includes a duck salad tossed with Guinness honey mustard, a blackened ribeye with crawfish coleslaw and cheese grits, and a “Capital Soul Plate” including greens simmered with bacon, smoked gouda mac and cheese, and other regional specialties.

One of seven Nick’s locations in Southern California beach communities (plus inland Pasadena), this stylishly casual establishment serves what they call “weekend breakfast” from 7.30 to 11.30 on Saturdays and Sundays — call it early brunch. The choices include fried chicken and waffle with sausage gravy, short ribs Benedict, and a breakfast burrito with Nueske’s bacon, hash browns, and scrambled eggs.