Breakfast might be the most important meal of the day, but when it comes to food writing, it is also the most neglected. Ignored in favor of its chic, more cosmopolitan (and occasionally alcoholic) weekend sibling, brunch, poor breakfast just languishes in a puddle of wet cereal. And all of that goes double for mid-week breakfasts. So when HungryMan and I found ourselves with an extra A.M. hour in the middle of last week, we set out to try to find something special with which to kick-start our Wednesday. Perhaps we were also smarting from our recent Brasserie 52 disappointment, because we both confessed to a long-unfulfilled craving for something French–something in the omelette family.

Now, it should be pretty apparent that we’re no enemies of diners–spend a few weeks in Gotham and it’s hard not to see that some of the best food in the city is cooked by short-order line cooks. But as we thought about the best way to satisfy our omelette jones, we decided to skip a trip to our favorite local egg slinger and focus instead on trying to find a genuinely French breakfast. So despite having eaten a few very mediocre dinners there in the past, we headed to Pigalle, one of the brasseries in the Nice Matin group of restaurants. After all, we figured, the kitchen staff is likely to be different for the breakfast service, so why not give the spot one last chance?

It turned out to be the best thing we did that day. HungryMan’s Fritatta Espagnole (pictured top, $8.95) was loaded with chunks of potato, tomato and onion, flavors that matched beautifully with the piquancy of the chorizo. The kitchen serves this dish with a small, lightly dressed mesclun salad, a well-considered touch, as fried potatoes would have been not only redundant, but too much fat for one morning plate. My own smoked salmon and asparagus omelette ($8.50) was much lighter and taller than the frittata, and therefore worked better with the fist-sized serving of fried potatoes that accompanied them, although we both thought the potatoes were a bit too greasy. But the real triumph of the morning was the bread–both HungryMan’s and my eggs were served with two thin, very lightly grilled slices of fantastic white sourdough bread that tasted quite a bit like Poilâne. The superb bread and the very respectable cafés au lait made this an unexpectedly sophisticated breakfast. One that, in light of our previous experiences at the restaurant, we never would have expected from Pigalle. So perhaps it is time for the Nice Matin management to shake things up on Eighth Avenue–if we knew the breakfast kitchen staff were cooking at night, we’d quite happily return again to the brasserie for dinner. If they’ve got this kind of respect for and flair with morning fare, we think they certainly deserve a crack at onion soup and boeuf bourguignon.

Pigalle, 790 Eighth Avenue (at 48th Street), 212-489-2233.