(Photo Courtesy of Morning Jay's)
Justin Lambert and Nate Crawford have a very firm stance when it comes to breakfast food — if you have to put an egg on it to make it fit the menu, it’s not worth it.
“If throwing an egg on it makes it a brunch item, I’d rather not serve it, because frankly how boring,” Crawford told Chambana Eats.
Lambert and Crawford are the duo and couple behind Morning Jay’s, a “nomadic breakfast pop up,” that travels around the Chicago area to bring their own take on brunch and breakfast classics. Now, they’re bringing their delights on May 18 to The Space in downtown Champaign for a one-time brunch service .
The brunch will feature dishes from the chefs and owners of The Space, Ian Nutting and Doug Hodge, as well as from Morning Jay’s, making the pop-up a true collaboration between the two entities.
“They’re going to have a couple of the things that they’ve become known for, like a breakfast sandwich they’ve been working on and some baked goods that Nate does really well,” Nutting said. “That’s something we don’t really do, so having that be a feature made sense.”
(Photo Courtesy of Morning Jay's)
That breakfast sandwich will include a housemade falafel patty from The Space, served on one of Morning Jay’s signature biscuits.
In addition to the sandwich and baked goods, the menu will also include one of Morning Jay’s signature dishes — Morning Joy — a fenugreek-laden breakfast gnocchi plate.
But, again, don’t expect an egg on top.
“When we were first developing our breakfast gnocchi, we originally had an egg on top, but sitting there looking at it, I wondered what it was actually doing for the dish,” Lambert said. “I don’t want it to be a breakfast item because there’s an egg, I want it to feel like it’s a morning pickup.”
‘These are artists’
The timing of the collaboration is fortuitous. Morning Jay’s will start serving a small selection of their planned dishes for dinner service on Saturday, May 17, the same day as commencement ceremonies for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
On Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. — a day when The Space wouldn’t ordinarily be open — the grills and burners will be firing in the restaurant for the brunch menu the two eateries are serving.
Beyond the Chicago-based brunch pop-up landing in town for one of Champaign’s busiest weekends of the year, the partnership between Morning Jay’s and The Space runs deeper.
“We took notice [of Morning Jay’s] because they were taking off on Instagram pretty hard,” Nutting said. “[Nate] commented on a couple of our things, and I saw that he had like 20,000-plus Instagram followers, and I was like who the fuck is this influencer commenting on our shit?”
That influencer was Crawford’s personal account, @natebakedthis.
Unbeknownst to Nutting and The Space, Crawford is a native of St. Joseph, Illinois, just eight miles to the east of Urbana. Crawford and Lambert had already eaten at The Space by the time Nutting reached out.
“[When we first ate at The Space] our appetizers came out, and they were on these beautiful plates. It was an octopus with a puree, and it was beautiful,” Lambert said. “Then our sandwiches came out on plastic McDonald’s plates, and we were like, these are artists.”
For the Morning Jay’s duo, the food served at The Space matches the vibe they’re going for.
“They’re stripping away the pretentiousness of food and making it accessible,” Lambert said. “We talk about this all the time because when we’re doing menus, we wonder if our audience will get this, and then I realize they will. Because we’re doing it.”
Dishes like breakfast gnocchi, or a tahini black sesame marble coffee cake, work on the menu, not because people are specifically seeking out those flavors, but because they’re trusting cooks like Crawford, Lambert, Nutting and Hodge with their experience.
“We keep thinking about what our audience is going to be [at the pop-up],” Lambert said. “But I think because of the nature of The Space, people are just going to get it. They’re here for the artistry of it.”
Out of this world brunch?
Despite this big commencement-weekend brunch effort, don’t expect The Space to get into the brunch game anytime soon, Nutting said.
More than two years ago, as Nutting and Hodge were crowdfunding the launch of the restaurant, the two promised Kickstarter backers brunch.
“We promised one brunch, and we did that one brunch,” Nutting said. “Doug and I from the beginning have been a little anti-brunchy. We don’t like getting up early on Sundays, and there's sort of a cliche of a brunch crowd drinking too many mimosas and staying at tables too long and not ordering enough things.”
But the collaboration between Morning Jay’s and The Space does mean that brunch isn’t off the table forever, Nutting said.
“There’s clearly money to be made in brunch, and that is an alluring possibility,” Nutting said. “So I don’t think this is a taste of what’s to come in any sort of regular way, but I would say that we are interested in at least changing our policy of never doing brunch to maybe sometimes doing specialty things like this.”
Brunch or not, more collaborations are definitely of interest to The Space.
“So much about [collaboration] is fundamental to what we’re trying to do, which is to be more community-facing, collaborative and embracing of this entanglement of peoples and ideas and things,” Nutting said. “It would be really cool to do more things with people in Chicago, people from Indy, people from St. Louis, but also smaller towns around here.”
See you in line?
The Space and Morning Jay’s are not accepting reservations for their pop up. Instead, an RSVP page will help them get an idea of a potential headcount to better plan the service.
Reservations, Nutting said, are not something The Space will do. On a weekend where lines will be very prevalent up and down Green Street, and most restaurants around town are booked for brunch and dinner, Nutting said leaning into the collaborative and community nature that a line represents will be key.
“I hate reservations. I fucking love the barbecue line. I love the idea of a line, I love the idea of waiting in line and meeting people,” Nutting said. One of the goals has always been to be popular enough to deserve a line. If you have that line, the community that can form in that line is what it’s about.”
Jake Williams is a journalist, editor and publisher, as well as the CEO of the Illini Media Company.