A visit to Miss Shirley’s Café in Annapolis is an exercise in delicious excess. Plates overflow with the restaurant’s deeply American favorites: biscuits, BBQ pork, fried chicken, stuffed French toast, grits, gravy, eggs in every culinary style, hash browns, tater tots, and coleslaw. The menu swings from saccharine to savory, from soft and tender to crunchy and salty. Sometimes, this swing is dizzyingly eye-opening; other times it is gustatorily brilliant.
Dishes like the Coconut Cream Stuffed French Toast embrace both salty and sweet. The coconut cream is abundant, oozing out of the egg-dipped toast onto a warm plate in a flood of sweet, rich cream. Challah bread is sliced thick, sandwiching the cream between layers of tender, light slices while simultaneously offering a balance of flavors and textures. Bruleed Bananas bring the presentation well over the top, their sweetness and crunch adding to the whole and making a profound statement that breakfast (or brunch) can indeed set the tone for the day and that this day will be both satisfying and lavish.
Founded in Baltimore’s Roland Park in 2005 with just forty-two tables, the restaurant expanded in size and added locations to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and Annapolis. Accolades followed with mentions in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Food Network Magazine. Zagat, our very own magazine, and others published favorable reviews, and the Restaurant Association of Maryland named the restaurant Maryland’s Favorite Restaurant.
Miss Shirley’s is open for breakfast and lunch every day. The menu reflects Corporate Executive Chef Brigitte Bledsoe’s affinity for crafting classic breakfast dishes and lunch sandwiches, soups, and salads with her signature sense of flair, multiple levels of flavor, and presentation. Some recipes employ local ingredients, typically from Baltimore-area produce, seafood, meat, and spice vendors.
A recent visit to Miss Shirley’s in Annapolis was an occasion to sample a broad array of items from the menu. We started with the BBQ Chicken Fried Deviled Eggs, Strawberry Lemonade Baked Mini Donuts, and Raspberry Mascarpone Biscuits. Adults at the table can choose from a variety of handcrafted cocktails; although I was prepared to eat guilt-free on a midweek day, I couldn’t justify one of these. The children were thrilled with tall pulls of deeply red Shirley Temples, each with four maraschino cherries that rapidly disappeared.
Maraschinos are something you like, or you don’t. I thought about that while dining at Miss Shirley’s. In truth, I don’t usually indulge for breakfast: I usually fill up on coffee until I arrive at lunch starving for something substantial, usually green. But at Miss Shirley’s, diners throw caution, calorie count, and color to the wind, instead diving deep into a culinary adventure.
Case in point: those devilled eggs. Boiled egg yolks are mixed with pulled BBQ chicken and pimiento cheese, breaded in panko, and deep-fried. The plate, which houses four of these wickedly delectable mouthfuls, is garnished with coleslaw, drizzled with BBQ sauce and dusted with Cajun spice. It’s an adventure on the palate: tender yolks, the signature flavor of pimiento, sweet BBQ sauce with a bit of chicken thrown in…and it’s all in a perfect egg-shaped fried oval on the plate.
The strawberry donuts were deceptively filling; almost too much so to be a “wake up” as listed on the menu. The mascarpone biscuits are sweet as well, these being nicely sized. The housemade peach-mango jam accompanying the biscuits paired nicely with the tang of fresh raspberries mixed into the dough.
Three of my party chose to go with breakfast items, while the other two chose savory lunch entrees. The breakfasts were quite large, consuming most of the plate. Buckwheat pancakes with blueberries and bananas cooked into the cake were at least six inches across, stacked three tall. These flapjacks would fill a logger! The Belgian Waffles were served in, what at first, seemed to be not unlike a cinnamon roll, standing up in small circles on the plate, drizzled with cinnamon Danish cream cheese frosting. Pancakes and waffles are served with whipped butter and Grade A Pure Maple Syrup, dusted with powdered sugar, and garnished with raspberry puree. Diners can choose from the cinnamon Danish, banana chocolate chip, raspberry white chocolate, or fresh fruit, and can take all of this to the next level with a scoop of ice cream.
A selection of six omelets makes possible a protein-packed breakfast loaded with extras. The Fried Chicken, Biscuits, and Gravy omelet is three eggs whipped into an omelet filled with fried chicken, peppadews, green onion, and white cheddar cheese, and topped with housemade Everything Biscuit and Chesapeake chicken sausage gravy. Loggers would presumably be full on this entrée as well.
I chose the Healthy Hot Mess Scramble, which combined quinoa and microgreens with broccoli, spinach, avocado mash, peppadews, and sweet potatoes. This scramble was an interesting mix of cruciferous vegetable, leafy greens, tropical mash, and tubers, so I wasn’t sure quite what to expect. What I received was an edible party in the mouth, a dance of flavorful veggies across the plate, unimpeded by mounds of cheese or an overdose of salty butter. The quinoa added texture and depth, not to mention fiber and the best elements of its power as a superfood. Other lighter items (note I didn’t use the word “light”, because they aren’t necessarily light on calories or portion sizing) on the menu include a crust-less egg white quiche and a farm fresh quinoa bowl chockablock with veggies and available with added proteins like fried eggs, chicken, salmon, and shrimp.
Since we arrived at Miss Shirley’s just short of noon, my companion preferred a sandwich. Poppy’s Fried Chicken Classic hit the spot, with three buttermilk-dipped, deep-fried chicken breast pieces sandwiched in a Kaiser roll and topped with Havarti cheese, slices of heirloom tomato, iceberg lettuce, and pickles. The chef ups the traditional fried chicken sandwich ante by adding a dollop of buttermilk ranch and a dose of housemade buffalo sauce to the recipe, making this dish at once salty, sweet, spicy, tender, crunchy, and delicious.
Miss Shirley’s is named for Shirley McDowell, a longtime friend and employee of the Dopkin family, owners of the chain. McDowell, a food professional at The Classic Catering People, was known for her sassy charm and sheer joy of preparing dishes for those she loved. It’s obvious that the menu at Miss Shirley’s, which gives a nod to McDowell’s southern charm, remains rooted in the company’s mission to bring comfort and joy to diners and guests. Our server, Josh, offered a dry wit not typically associated with establishments that turn over tables as quickly as does Miss Shirley’s. There’s frequently a line out the door at the Annapolis location, and Josh was clearly managing the lunchtime rush. He did so with patience and composure, not even batting an eye at the unusual number of takeout boxes we required.
If semi-Southern breakfast and brunch specials are something you like, consider loading up friends, family, and especially out of town guests, and head for Miss Shirley’s. The atmosphere is casual and welcoming, the food is comforting, portion sizes are robust, and the service is both efficient and kind. Do consider that some items, like the Soft Shell Crab Sandwich, Bay-O Po Boy, Crab Cake and Fried Green Tomato Eggs Benedict, and Crab Happy Chesapeake Chicken Sammy are market-priced, which fluctuates with season and availability.
