Rivers Edge Restaurant

What to eat at Rivers Edge Restaurant in Milwaukee, WI

Rivers Edge bacon is some of the best you’ll find in any roadside café: double-thick, smoky-flavored, and delicious. Pancakes are good, potato pancakes even better: thin and moist with crisp lacy edges. Hash brown potatoes served alongside eggs are cooked with ample grease and a good measure of sweet onions; and the house white bread, homemade and thick-sliced, makes terrific buttered toast.

We like this place for breakfast north of Milwaukee because it opens at 4:30am, but we do have a few caveats. The donuts that look homemade on the cake pedestal just beyond the cash register may indeed be homemade, but they are not good: cold, heavy, bad-tasting. The butterflied grilled brat (short for bratwurst) served with eggs in the morning has a nice taste, but it’s tough — a dish we’d recommend only to those who want a good chew in the morning.

A plain, rectangular café a few blocks off Route 33, River Edge is the type of place that attracts a steady clientele of truckers to its low counter, which is surrounded by chairs rather than stools. There is a scattering of Formica tables, too; but if you want to be where the action is and eavesdrop on the men in John Deere caps, the counter is the place to be.