“And now we own a restaurant,” Stephanie says happily.

            A breakfast restaurant! “I like early mornings,” Braden notes. “As a kid, breakfast was my family’s favorite meal, and my mom would even make breakfast dishes for dinner. For me, that’s the crux of it.”

            “Breakfast is fun,” Stephanie adds. “I love to come in early in the morning, and find Braden roasting corn or poblano peppers, or he’s got some crazy ingredient happening that’s different from how you’d expect it to be made. It’s always exciting.”

            The couple tested the boiling waters of the food business in 2017, with a “pop-up,” sharing a kitchen with another business on weekends only. “We were invited to use the space on Sundays,” Stephanie says. “But we were so busy from day one that the owners asked us to do Saturdays, too. It just got busier and busier. Then the owners sold our building, so we built this place.”

            “This place,” was right around the corner, at 21 North Bartlett Street. “It had been a consignment shop,” Braden says. “The woman overseeing the property told us, ‘We’ve got this space, and my husband’s an architect, and...’ We looked at the interior, and Stephanie took to it immediately.”

            “The brilliant light shining through the big windows won me over,” Stephanie explains.

            A week after they’d seen the space, Braden concludes, “The plans were drawn up and we went for it.”

            Nine months later, the new Over Easy was born, immediately contributing a vital new food flair to the area. “Our website calls the menu ‘eclectic,’” Braden says, “but I don’t like to label it. I take stuff that I like and put it together with other stuff that I like. I’m influenced by Southwest style, but I’m also influenced by what’s

available in the Northwest. The seasons here in Southern Oregon are awesome. It’s the perfect climate for growing the stuff that I like to incorporate in our cuisine. I can always find a farm that has what I need. I think it’s important to use what’s available locally. So I meld the influences from those parts of the country, and it works out.

“We start everything from scratch,” he continues. “Every morning we make fresh biscuits, mushroom gravy, roasted corn—everything that we can do ‘same day,’ staying as fresh as possible. It’s the way I’ve always come up in kitchens.”

            Diners will notice that the menu changes regularly, and their favorite combinations may not show up again for several months. “That keeps it interesting for me,” Braden notes. “I get bored easily, so if I had a static menu I’d be wasting my knowledge. Doing it this way keeps my brain firing.”

            With Braden’s burners sizzling in the kitchen, Stephanie keeps things moving smoothly in the front of the house. “We get to welcome these really incredible people that want to come in, sit down, relax with family and friends, and enjoy the food that we’re serving,” she says. “And our staff is made up of creative, positive people, so we have a great support system.

            “New people walk in and see this really different style of food, and say, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I‘ve never had anything like this. It’s really different.’ By the end of their meal they’ll say, ‘This is really cool. I can’t wait to see what he (as they point toward the kitchen) does next.’”

            Diners visiting Over Easy quickly appreciate the special way that the menu grows, and the caring way the staff and proprietors perform. “It’s a wonderfully positive environment to be in,” Stephanie Hitt says. “We’re very lucky.”