The Hunt for Dark Breakfast

So basically omelette with matzo

An omelet wrapped in a paratha with a caffe latte to drink looks like the obvious answer... You can also play with the crust to filling ratio of a quiche...

How about doughnut with just the right amount of custard filling? Or perhaps a brioche with the right amount of French vanilla ice cream/gelato? A classic egg and cheese sandwich in your desired proportions?

While a delightfully funny article it also touches on something I’ve thought about many times before: just how uniform basically 99% of all (American) restaurant breakfast menus are. It’s really quite extraordinary in some ways how these menus are nearly entirely interchangeable from on to another. They might have very small tweaks and of course the ingredient specifics aren’t exact (specific butter brands, slight proportion differences)but by and large you could predict with almost perfect accuracy every single item that a typical breakfast menu in the US might have.

And I feel like that’s really a missed opportunity? Like even recognizing that of all meals breakfast is the most “comforting” and the one most likely for customers to want familiar, at the same time there are so many unexplored variants using the same ingredients (as this article shows!) that almost no restaurants will ever experiment with or offer. Lunch and dinner menus have massive variation in comparison!

The ones who walk away from omelettes.

french toast was dismissed far too lightly, it's exactly what goes into the gap. also savoury bread pudding.

Applying Tom Ngo's Embedded Constraint Graphics to Direct-Manipulation Breakfast Selection (Direct manipulation over simplicial complexes using barycentric interpolation: they're not just for breakfast any more.)

The Breakfast Simplex is a space of recipes parameterized by egg, milk, and flour ratios, normalized onto a simplex. Add butter or sugar and the dimension increases. Add prep method and you create adjacent regions. A breakfast buffet is a larger, possibly disconnected simplicial complex spanning multiple ingredient families.

That structure is exactly what Tom Ngo formalized and patented in Embedded Constraint Graphics in 1996 at Interval Research Corporation. I wrote about it when the patent expired in 2016:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12572696

US Patent #5933150: System for image manipulation and animation using embedded constraint graphics

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5933150

Tom wrote to me when I asked him about applying ECG to other applications after the patent expired:

>I am, of course, partial to the idea that gluing high-dimensional simplices at their edges and faces is an extremely general way to represent blending manifolds, in the same way that gluing polygons together has done us so much good in the 3D modeling space. I also think the >2 decades of progress since ECG have put us in a better position to do something really cool based on direct manipulation.

Golan Levin, Malcom Slaney, and Tom Ngo used the ECG graphical editor to build the vector face cartoons for Mouther, simply by dragging eyes, mouths, and features directly on the drawing:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180717222910/http://www.flong....

ECG defines example states at vertices. Compatible examples span simplices. The full state space is a simplicial complex. Interior points are barycentric blends. When you drag something in screen space, the system maps that motion into the n-dimensional interpolation space and solves for blend weights via a Jacobian pseudo-inverse instead of exposing parameters.

You don’t indirectly adjust abstract sliders. You directly manipulate concrete outcomes. The solver recovers coordinates.

The same formulation applies to interpolating vector drawings, mesh blending, facial animation, pose spaces, and other example-based interfaces where states are meaningful and compatibility matters.

Breakfast is a concrete instance. Pancake, crepe, and omelette define a simplex over ingredient ratios. Drag toward eggs and the egg weight increases. Drag toward milk and you move along that axis. Cross a shared face and you transition between dish families without leaving the manifold. The “Dark Breakfast” region is simply an unoccupied part of a valid simplex.

Simplicial complexes are useful UI primitives. They provide local linear interpolation inside zones and explicit global topology across zones. They scale to higher dimensions, while maintaining a user friendly 2D direct manipulation user interface. They encode constraints structurally instead of procedurally.

A pie menu is already a radial projection of a simplex. A direct-manipulation pie menu over ingredient space lets you drag in the direction of the flavor you want, with barycentric weights accumulating as you move.

The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus (Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Dec. 1991, cover story, user interface issue.)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-...

An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus (Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser and Ben Shneiderman. Presented at ACM CHI’88 Conference, Washington DC, 1988.)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...

As a certified expert breakfast cook, I bristle at the idea that scrambled eggs includes any ingredient other than eggs or seasoning.

Also, while I know that omelette is technically the whipping of large amounts of air into what is otherwise scrambled eggs, it feels wrong to me that "omelette" is categorized as "pure egg singularity". Is an omelette worth the time and effort over scrambled eggs if it does not include bits of vegetables, meat, and/or cheese folded inside like a taco?

maybe Portugal’s Pastel de Nata falls in the dark zone?

It’s a baked custard (so plenty of eggs) in a pie.

not sure the proportions match.

This reminded me of <https://xkcd.com/2893/>.

I love the idea and the writing, but the execution seems off. Cake has a very well-defined spot and Weetabix doesn’t? More work needed

No mention of Eggs Florentine?

where's porridge?

Breakfast has way more dimensions.

No jam and butter option when writing that long of a post on what to eat for breakfast is criminal.

I usually have egg on toast with plenty of butter. The combination sits squarely in the dark region I think.

I also get up early and it is often actually dark.

What about vegetable-forward breakfasts? Completely not on this chart.

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The concept of a 'Dark Breakfast Abyss' in the Breakfast Simplex is hilarious, but it got me thinking—maybe the reason we lack foods in that specific ratio of milk, flour, and eggs isn't because they'd destroy the world, but because they simply don't cook well conceptually. Like, an overly-battered omelette just turns into a gummy mess, not a crepe. It's fascinating how our culinary traditions naturally naturally sort themselves into these distinct mathematical vertices over centuries of trial and error.