With New York practically underwater at the moment, it takes a brave soul to step outside and challenge the elements, even if basic sustenance is part of the motivation. Credit Clinton Street Baking Company for coaxing us out. Wth our friend Dolin in tow, we made a pilgrimage to this Lower East Side breakfast mecca, a recent winner of Time Out New York’s award for Best Brunch. And we weren’t the only ones to be lured like earthworms out from our little holes on this Sunday morning: even with sheets of rain cascading from the rooftops, a line of 15 or more umbrellas curled down the street at 9:45 a.m., fifteen minutes before the restaurant was scheduled to open.

Such devotion from its customers is CSBC’s well-deserved reward for six years of consistency in both friendly service and close attention to detail and flavors. Much of this success is due to the efforts of chef and co-owner Neil Kleinberg, who, though Brooklyn-born and bred, has managed to re-create a small-town diner with a Southern accent, complete with homemade biscuits, fried green tomatoes, po’ boys and baked grits. Yet the wholesome vibe has an edge. Those grits? They’re made with fontina cheese and white truffle oil. And the po’ boys? They can be made with yellowtail flounder or even soft-shell crab. The pace is also more urban than rural: Chef Kleinberg cranks out dozens of his nearly faultless plates as fast as the staff can squeeze diners through the door, and each of the dishes that lands on the pass-through between the kitchen and dining room is accompanied by a satisfyingly sonorous ‘ding!’

The presence of fried green tomatoes is the first sign you’re not in a typical Gotham breakfast spot. These come lightly battered in a cornmeal crisp coat that is so lightly fried that they never feel heavy, even as the discs retain the fruit’s original slightly firm structure. Better still, they’re never soggy. A ramekin of jalapeno spiked sour cream is there for dunking; and while the sauce wimps out on the heat, it provides a smooth textural counterpoint to the grainy crunch of the fried tomato rounds. At $4 for a serving, these are also a tremendously good deal.

Dolin’s sweet tooth steered her to one of CSBC’s daily specials, a plate of vanilla buttermilk waffles ($15) made from batter so moist that these waffles cook up to resemble nothing more than Clinton Street’s own pancakes ($10). There is some crunch toward the edges, but for the most part, these waffles are as light as a Ferran Adrià-inspired vanilla-infused air. But there is substance on the plate as well– the waffles are topped with a dreamy, thick lemon honey yogurt and dotted with strawberries, blackberries and sprinkled with crunchy crumbles of housemade granola. Adding to the decadence is a small dish of warm maple butter that is more maple syrup than butter, with a rich overtone of almost-burnt caramel. A forkful of waffle, fruit, yogurt and caramel syrup might make this seem like more dessert than breakfast, but for those who managed to make it here despite the rain, sweet waffles are a just reward.

My eggs benedict ($13) was another decadent layering of favorites. Taken from the top: a creamy, properly thickened hollandaise, poached eggs (about 30 seconds overdone, a rare disappointment), thick triangles of ham steak grilled to steaming, and a warm homemade buttermilk biscuit, a Clinton Street specialty. Here, the restaurant’s innovation comes through via the biscuits, which are not only superior at sopping up juices from the eggs and the hollandaise than any English muffin could be, they are also missing the yeasty tang of the more traditional bread base, and as a result, it is possible to taste the cayenne and acid in the hollandaise sauce.

There is much more to Clinton Street’s menu that is worth mention, including their famous, award-winning pancakes, over which we caught a neighboring table purring, ‘these are far better than Sarabeths,’ a claim we won’t dispute. There is also a Spanish scramble, a brioche french toast, a smoked salmon version of the eggs benedict, and a wild mushroom frittata, each of which grabbed innocent bystanders by the nostrils and turned heads as the plates landed on the pass-through. Ding!

Clinton Street’s servers take the restaurant’s popularity in stride and somehow remain unfailingly helpful and polite. On our visit this weekend, they were happy to answer our questions about the menu and more importantly: to let each table take its time eating, regardless of the heaving mass of humanity at the door, waiting to get in.

To avoid becoming one of just such a crowd, we recommend that you get there early–at 10 a.m. or earlier on weekends, or better yet, during the week. Clinton Street serves from its brunch menu seven days a week, not just on Saturdays and Sundays. This is useful data for those three-day weekends or holidays when nobody else seems to be serving brunch. And if the weather continues to be this wet and dreary, pancakes and frittatas might just be the kind of mid-week motivation we’ll need to get us out of the house and onto our ark.

Clinton Street Baking Company, 4 Clinton Street, between Houston and Stanton Streets, 646-602-6263.