Humphrey Bogart Ate These Breakfast Foods For Lunch Every Day

How did one of cinema's greatest tough guys begin his day? In a poem called "Humphrey Bogart's Breakfast," Oliver James Lomax imagined a morning meal consisting of black coffee, cigarettes, and bourbon. According to Bogart, however, he always started his morning with tea, not coffee. In a 1942 interview he gave to Photoplay (reprinted in ClickAmericana), he said, "Here I am ready to murder off a half dozen guys on the set in another hour, and what do I do? I drink tea for breakfast. Isn't that a laugh?" (The cigarette part may have been true, though, according to a photo of him breakfasting on the set of "The African Queen.") Even though Bogart wasn't big on starting his day with solid food, his favorite lunch was that classic combo of bacon and eggs, typically considered more of a breakfast thing.

At the time of the interview, Bogie admitted he was stuck in somewhat of a rut when it came to his eating habits. He only liked plain cooking and wanted steaks or chops for dinner (his wife got pretty sick of this). His lunch options were even more limited. Although he said he tried to talk himself into making different choices, he kept returning to the same thing day after day. As he put it, "All morning while I'm strangling some actor to death, I think to myself, 'Shall I have a salad or lamb chops?' What do I end up with? Eggs and bacon. The waiter doesn't even take my order anymore. He sees me coming and that's it."

It was in 1942 that Humphrey Bogart dished on his limited food preferences, but that same year also marked the opening of Romanoff's, the iconic California restaurant where the Hollywood elite would meet to eat. Bogart soon staked out a booth of his own, arriving every day to dine at 2 p.m. Even though his chosen foods were breakfast items, breakfast gives way to brunch at 10:30 a.m., so Bogie was definitely brunching.

By later in the decade, Bogart seemed to have moved on from his strictly bacon and eggs diet to something ever-so-slightly different: ham and eggs. This was also the standing order of Dix Steele, the troubled screenwriter Bogart portrayed in 1950s "A Lonely Place." In the movie, Romanoff's was thinly disguised as a restaurant called Paul's. But in the novel on which it was based, Romanoff's was called by its rightful name. 

The fictional Steele had somewhat more gastronomic tastes than the actor who played him, as the character was known to eat muffins, salads, strawberry tarts, and salami and swiss cheese on rye. Still, Bogart eventually branched out a bit — but only a bit. There are accounts of him ordering omelets and french toast many times. True to his legend, though, his brunches were boozy ones. His food was often accompanied by a scotch and soda followed by coffee with brandy.