Every now and then a breakfast dish – even a vegetarian breakfast dish – comes along that steals your heart and satisfies your longings. To wit: Hearth ’61’s vegetable hash ($14), a richly layered masterpiece of flavors and textures.
Chef de cuisine Alfred Muro delivers the goods in a sizzling cast-iron skillet lined with skin-on fingerling potatoes simmered with garlic and thyme and then fried to perfection. He tops the spuds with a pleasing mix of sautéed zucchini, yellow squash, red onions, shishito peppers and wilted spinach sprinkled with pepper jack and smoked cheddar cheeses, then blankets the vegetables with house-made Hatch chile gravy, a buttery number that fills in all the crevices between the vegetables. To that, he adds two over-easy eggs (optional for vegetarians/vegans) and crowns the whole megillah with shishito crema, an emulsion sauce laced with piment d’Espelette, a medium-hot dried French pepper with a delicate finish.
Muro vows that the dish isn’t overly spicy for his heat-averse guests, but one in seven shishito peppers can be pretty zesty, he says. “We try to temper our spice hubris.”
Hearth ’61 at Mountain Shadows
5445 E. Lincoln Dr., Paradise Valley
855-485-1417, mountainshadows.com
