The two dining concepts at Eos & Nyx are as different as night and day. Executive Chef Nicko Moulinos’ daytime brunch menu ventures into familiar American territories, with a sincere attempt to refine them, alongside a couple of dishes with carefully appointed influences from Asia.
There’s a variation on a banh mi (“bone” thugs-n-harmony) and a crab and yuzu omelet. The graphic designer who typeset the menu insisted upon lowercase lettering, which intentionally draws attention to the punned name of each dish.
Friends with benedicts leads the brunch menu with everyone’s favorite combination of poached eggs and ham. Because the kitchen is newly awakened, our server’s eyes clouded over with panic when I asked for the eggs to be poached hard. The cooks managed to skillfully make them so without appearing to object.
This iteration of a benedict also included an English muffin that’s as thick as a hockey puck. Every ingredient rests comfortably on top of each of the substantially split halves. A brown butter hollandaise carried the sauce toward a richer, Southern flavor and away from its French origin story. Roasted baby potatoes, cooked with herbs until tender, rounded out the plate.
The gravy on the bottom of the sir saucealot bowl is a pale roux with a consistency that was similar to the hollandaise but eggless and without the bright note of citrus. Curiously, every dish on the menu included eggs except this one and breaking B(re)AD, a stuffed French toast. The scallion biscuits—a smart interpretation of scallion pancakes—and pork sausage would have been better served with a side of scrambled eggs.
At the table next to ours, a father and his two young daughters shared a hearty bowl of you drive me loco moco, with steamed rice, a beef patty, one egg sunny side up, black garlic and gravy. Their plate of breaking B(re)AD was cut up into bite-sized pieces, appropriate for smaller fingers and hands.
Eos & Nyx stuff their version with a sweetened cream cheese and serve it with a side of not millionaire’s bacon, but billionaire’s bacon (after all, this is a new era of prosperity for the very few)—a fat strip of pork belly that, in our case, didn’t get cooked all the way through.
I ate brunch on the soft-opening weekend of Eos & Nyx, located directly across the street from the Hammer Theatre. The interior design recapitulates the rounded streamline architectural accents of the 1920s, marries them with cool 1970s earth tones and then coats them with 21st century fabrics and materials. If the banquettes were removed, the space could double as a decadent fin de siècle discothèque.
The mood on that recent Saturday afternoon was celebratory, busy and buzzing with a full house of carousing guests. Music was playing at the highest decibel point possible, pumped up to turn ordinary conversations into volleys of whats and shouts.
The press release suggests that dinner is a quieter, more intimate affair. Our server told us Moulinos’ nighttime menu takes its inspiration from the 22 countries that border the Mediterranean Sea.
Throughout brunch, the front patio doors were left open. It was chilly inside. I kept my coat on throughout the meal, even after a hot cup of coffee, which was served with an hourglass. When the sand ran down, I was allowed to drink it. At one point, someone from the kitchen pushed a cart of chopped wood past our table and into the kitchen toward the oven. I felt like following it through the kitchen’s swinging doors.
Eos & Nyx, open Tue–Thurs 5pm–9pm, Fri–Sat 10am–2pm and 5pm-10pm, and Sun 9am–3pm. 201 S. Second St., Suite 120, San Jose. 408.831.6880. eosnyxsj.com.
