Appropriate to its exclusively breakfast and brunch menu, The Corner Restaurant in downtown Milford is a place you might feel comfortable entering in robe and slippers. Antiquey cupboards and bookcases stuffed with books and knick-knacks turn the dining room into something like a parlor. And co-owner Michelle Lebel is a maternal—alert and welcoming—presence behind the counter. “Hi, how are you? Just one, honey?” she greets a solitary customer who’s just wandered in. “Welcome to The Corner.”
The Corner is a family-run operation. On the day I arrived, Lebel’s daughter Elyza was serving tables. (Her youngest, Charlotte, also works there on weekends.) Michelle and her husband, Amer, the head cook, opened the restaurant 30 years ago, before their children were born. (“The restaurant is our first baby.”) And they keep it open 7 days a week, so it’s entirely practical to think of it as their home. But the decor also speaks to their peripatetic history. I admired a colorful collection of foreign banknotes from their travels on the wall behind the counter. “I started putting my own up a long time ago,” Michelle says. “I put up five or six.” Malaysia. Costa Rica. Barbados. “And then people just started to bring them… They’re all beautiful.”
Their journeys are most significantly reflected in their menu. Over the summer, Michelle and one of her daughters had gone to Japan, and they returned with mental notes about their breakfasts there. In the kitchen, Amer experimented first with souffle-like Japanese pancakes. But, he said, “the egg whites have to be made to order and we get so busy.” So he then brought in Japanese milk bread, which is brioche-like in its thickness, and he tried French-toasting it.
The result, an off-menu special for $18.95 with home fries included, is an impressive cuboid, as big as a slice of cake, garnished with whipped cream and caramelized slices of banana. I was pleased by how the bread had taken the batter. It was sumptuous while still recognizably bready, evoking the sweetness of its soak without turning mushy.
“It’s really firm, this bread,” Amer says. “I just lower it into the [batter] before I bake it. But then you have to griddle it”—all six sides under the spatula—“after you bake it.” Throughout the week, he had been finishing it with Michelle’s finely calibrated mixture of bourbon and maple syrup. “We can’t serve liquor, but we can feed you liquor,” Amer clarifies with a big laugh. He speculates that he might try mixing the syrup with butter in the next iteration, but Michelle suggests that customers would miss the bourbon for having paired particularly well with the bananas.
Two more customers, paying their check, stop to admire the Japanese/French toast, as much for its architectural grandeur as for its apparent richness. This is an intended consequence of Amer’s modus operandi. “I want my food to be three-dimensional... I love beauty. The higher I go, the better I feel. Because it’s pleasing to your eyes. It’s not just, like, here, throw it on the plate, okay, hey, how are you doing.”
The Corner opened in a space that had been vacated by a more traditional diner, with booths along the walls and a “hey, how are you doing” approach to breakfast. After a few months with a likewise basic eggs and sandwiches menu, Amer asked the cook he had hired to “come up with something special,” resulting in a prosaic Philly cheesesteak doused with brown gravy.
And so Amer took over the kitchen, as he had already begun thinking both inside and outside the French toast. “Apple-stuffed French toast was our first-ever special,” Michelle says. “Back then, no one did anything [beyond the traditional breakfast plate] except, like, scones or muffins. And we thought, ‘We should try things for brunch.’”
Specials have only gotten more special since, which helps The Corner keep standing out. “Brunch is a huge thing now. Even the bars are doing it,” Michelle says. “But I honestly still feel like ours, there’s just so much love in a lot of dishes that are three to four hours of prep.” It also helps to have a mental pantry filled with unique ingredients. “I’ve been to Asia many times, so I know the food there,” Amer says. “I’m from Pakistan, but I’ve lived in many different countries. I’ve been to high school in Dubai. My father was working there. I went to college in Greece. Then I came here and got my master’s in finance.” He then became a commodities trader, but never stopped simultaneously working in restaurants—and building a mental inventory of meals at all of them.
“A lot of people work in restaurants when they’re young. You either love it or you hate it,” Michelle adds. Like Amer, she had come to it early. “I think I was 14. I worked in a restaurant through the summer and I started as a dishwasher, and my boss said, ‘You talk too much.’” She laughs buoyantly. “‘You need to go out front with the customers.’”
In addition to restaurant work, Michelle took culinary arts classes in high school, which provided her with her own base of knowledge and inspiration for dish construction. One of the duo’s most enduring collaborations—and a dish that epitomizes the Corner mandate for extensive methodical prep but fast consistent plating—is the Malaysian pulled pork ($18.95). “You know that the Malaysians eat a lot of rice with their meat,” Amer says. “But we use a rice bowl instead of making rice.” He means a bowl literally made from rice: paper-thin around and artfully curled at the edges to contain, from the bottom up, perfect medium-fried eggs, a generous dollop of stewed pulled pork and a delicate tangle of fried onions garnished with shaved parmesan.
This dish’s popularity surely derives from the pork, which, by the time it was served, had been simmering long enough in its own sumptuous stew to be neither runny nor dry but flavorfully soft, with a surprising burst of ginger. The rice bowl gave the dish a contrasting crisp, and fresh, warm Syrian-style bread triangles invited mopping.
The trial and error employed by the Lebels to convert a Southeast Asian dinner into a Connecticut brunch amounted to more than just adding an egg. (Michelle recalls that they had tried several meats before settling on pork.) But it is the abundant egg as the foundation of a morning meal that gave the Lebels a familiar foundation from which to hatch something new.
Alert for other things to pair the egg with, the Lebels returned from a trip to Barcelona with an obsession for pork belly. “We both wanted to do something with it,” Michelle says, “and I knew I wanted to do a [truffle] pesto.” They experimented further with fungi and breads before deciding to serve the pork belly, pan-seared, with two over-medium eggs, portobello mushrooms and the pesto on a toasted baguette ($22.95). “That’s the best time in the kitchen,” Michelle says, “when we both can kind of take a dish and work on it a few weeks until it’s perfect.” Their knack for co-developing dishes culminated in appearances in food segments on local television; they recreated the pork belly on NBC Connecticut’s CT Live.
Broadcast coverage of Corner cuisine even went national in 2014, when the Cooking Channel program Road Trip with G. Garvin taped an episode in the restaurant. “They don’t just come in,” Amer says. “They bring their whole trailer. Full of cameras and even a makeup station. And then they go into the kitchen and they move everything. They want it to be convenient for making the show.” The episode and its host, Chef G. Garvin, were particularly interested in the Lebels’ South Indian spiced duck wrap ($22.95).
Amer still doesn’t know how the Cooking Channel caught wind of it, except to say that national—or at least interstate—recognition for the wrap had come earlier. “People come from South Carolina. They come all the way to come here. Lot of people from Long Island, from Florida. Traveling from Florida all the way to Newport, they always stop here.” All for the express foodie purpose of getting their fix of the duck wrap.
Having traveled a considerably shorter distance to get it, I totally got it. It was the best portable breakfast I’ve ever had. The duck makes a dense, spicy compote ringed around a pillowy fill of scrambled egg. There’s also a little bit of cheese, but the egg was doing the work—really, beyond the call of duty for scrambled egg—of delivering a soft but substantial creaminess. The filling is flavor- and texture-rich in the manner of a full plate but compactly wrapped inside a fried tortilla, making it as easy to handle as a hot dog even after several bites.
To test it, I was inspired to eat one half of my duck wrap at The Corner, then finish the other half in the car. Amer had seen this strategy before and presented me with a perfectly sized takeout box. He then showed me four other sizes of takeout boxes on offer at The Corner. Their varied brown paper shapes whisper volumes about Amer’s love for three dimensions, while also hinting at the second part of this story, appearing tomorrow, in which the Lebels’ latest food service venture will be revealed. “From commodities trader to chef,” Amer says with amusement. “And now to engineer.”
Written and photographed by David Zukowski. Image 1 features the Japanese/French toast. Image 3 features the Malaysian pulled pork. Images 2 and 4 feature color and more inside The Corner.
