Rising food prices are pushing up restaurants’ costs, but some still manage to offer greasy plates to happy customers for about $3

Vancouverites love their cheap, no-frills breakfasts. Consider the fact that over 2,000 people have joined a Facebook group devoted to East Vancouver institution Bon’s Off Broadway (2451 Nanaimo Street).

In the past year, record-breaking oil prices and soaring food prices have put the cheap breakfast in jeopardy. The cost of food production and distribution is highly dependent on fossil fuels. Oil prices peaked at US$147.27 a barrel in July, but have since fallen below US$40.

But this volatility hasn’t stopped Bon’s from serving its $2.95 breakfast—eggs, hash browns, and toast, with a choice of ham, bacon, or sausage—which has been around for years.

Seven-year employee Joey Lui told the Georgia Straight that hard work and high volume are responsible for keeping the inexpensive deal in place.

“We’ve just got lots of people coming in,” Lui said at Bon’s after the greasy spoon had closed for the night. “We serve big portions, you know? We serve high volume, and the manager’s always running around here—there’s a good circle of family and friends. Customers always like to help out too, so it’s just like a family restaurant. Customers are family to us. We serve a few thousand pounds of potatoes in a week, and we’ve been doing this for over 20 years.”

Lui said the restaurant serves about 500 to 700 customers each day, with volume peaking on weekends.

Asked about the effect of food and oil prices, Lui is circumspect.

“We try to maintain the breakfast special, but everything else we raised by 50 cents or maybe a dollar” in the last year, he said. “We remain the same on the breakfast special, and also our soup and sandwich special, which is $3.75. We just keep that reasonable for everyone.”

In a much smaller space just off West 4th Avenue in Kitsilano, Lillian Zhao serves a $2.99 breakfast special with a slightly smaller portion to a lower volume of clientele.

Zhao said she has worked at Yummy Restaurant (1980 Pine Street) for about six years. She and owner Timmy Ye are the only two in the place, which can quickly fill up if construction workers or students in the area decide to take a break and want some cheap food. The breakfast includes five pieces of bacon or five sausages, two eggs, hash browns, and toast. Four slices of French toast costs the same—$3.14 with tax.

“Our location is not on a main street, our costs are less, and we normally don’t get [supplier] deliveries,” Zhao told the Straight. “I will go and pick it [an order] up myself, and I work very hard on this. So it’s really just like that: go to pick things up by yourself and order the things a little bit more than usual, and then they give you a good price. Just always finding something where they have the cheaper [wholesale] price.”

Zhao said she has lineups, but added that it “really depends”, and that a core group of treasured customers know when to come in to avoid the crowds.

“They come in here and they eat really fast,” she said. “They stop, eat, and then they go—it doesn’t take too long.”

Zhao said the breakfast offer will remain, as long as food prices stay where they are now and the rent doesn’t go up when the restaurant’s lease expires in 2010.

Herb Barbolet, an associate with SFU’s Centre for Sustainable Community Development, said food prices will keep rising. One way or another—bacon or sausage—this will have an impact.

“I am not sure about breakfast,” Barbolet said by phone. “There will always be specials. I am sure people will put on loss leaders, but food has gone up and will continue to go up substantially. It’s already happening, so we don’t have to wait for it to start going up. The price of oil is down now, but that won’t last long. As soon as that starts to go up again, all our products that are imported are going to go up—and food especially. There are more than two dozen different reasons why it will-all the way from climate chaos to peak everything. It is not just oil.”

Is the era of the cheap breakfast at an end?

“Yes, in general,” Barbolet said. “But there will always be exceptions.”