Sports Bar’s Great Breakfast And Hour Of Free Mimosas Is A Winner
It’s the move of a champion, and is to be celebrated.
Game Changers joins Sharkeez and Cafe Boogaloo as Hermosa Beach sports bars (well, Boogaloo is a music bar but shows sports before it turns to the tunes) that have weekend champagne brunches.
This is a great deal for anyone who wants to start their weekend day on a high note. Bubbly with breakfast is a long-standing South Bay tradition and now Game Changers steps to the plate with a winning deal.
I tried it out on a November Saturday and came away (mostly) impressed.
I’ll get to the mostly part in a moment. But first, the deal is you order breakfast and get one hour of free mimosas. The breakfasts are all in the $10 range and you can order up until 1 in the afternoon. The champagne is of decent quality and in our case the waiter made sure that there was more champagne than OJ in the glass.
There’s a full breakfast menu but a friend and I love omelettes, so we went straight to that section. There are several, including one that includes pulled pork, bacon and sausage, but since I’m still in my Hometown Fair 10K mindset, that seemed a bit heavy. My buddy loves steak and I joined him in ordering the tri-tip omelette.
All the Saturday college football games were on the TVs so we were ready for what presented itself to us.
And let me say, what presented itself to us was one fantastic omelette. It wasn’t large and fluffy, but had thin slices of tri-tip. It was covered in a seasoned sauce and lll the flavors in it were well balanced. It came with a choice of potatoes and toast (not both) and we both went for the potatoes (a necessary side dish to help soak up the alcohol on what turn out to be a long day of watching college football). Like the omelette, the potatoes were thin, but full of flavor. They were a bit spicy, too, a very tasty touch.
One fear, if you can call it that, that I have when I order breakfast in a sports bar is that I’ll get some small plate with a sliver of meat, a handful of hash browns and be hungry an hour later. That phobia – what would you call it, get-wasted-too-quickly-phobia? – reared its head when the plate arrived. I was hoping for plump like Charlie Weis and got Nick Saban instead.
But in sports, I’ll take Saban over Weis any day and the breakfast turned out to be as substantial as the Alabama coach. I could barely finish it, in fact.
As far as the champagne, as soon as it started flowing (which took a few moments) it kept coming until the hour expired. And get this, afterward, Game Changers has drinks specials for the games. Among them are 2-for-1 draft beers. I asked the waiter for which ones, and when he got to Stella Artois well, that’s all I needed to hear.
So after the free hours of mimosas, I was drinking half-priced Stellas! My tab for breakfast (well it was really lunch since we didn’t arrive until noon) for all this was about $20.
That’s what it costs at Sharkeez – and I like Sharkeez for weekend brunch, plus it adds spice with a Bloody Mary bar – and also next door at Boogaloo. These are great deals! You probably couldn’t get out as cheap if were you to do this at home.
But while Game Changers definitely scores with its brunch, it also also fumbled a few times (USC was on one of the TVs, so maybe the Trojans’ miscues were contagious). Unlike the undisciplined Lame Kiffin-coached Trojans, however, Game Changers recovered each time.
The biggest of these was the confusion that champagne brunch even exited. I was in Game Changers the previous night and the bartender said it came with two hours of free mimosas. When we showed up the next day, he was very glad to see us. Then a waiter came over and said they had no champagne brunch, that we must have the place confused with Boogaloo. I pointed to the bartender and after a somewhat lengthy discussion, a second waiter came over and said the mimosas were only good for one hour.
That’s fine, but it would be nice to have everyone reading out of the same playbook.
Then there was a potentially troubling, albeit brief, issue with getting the games on the TVs which the bartender had earlier told me they would be shown. I was very anxious for one game involving the #1 team in the nation and we had a quick and spirited discussion, and thankfully he took my tone in the lighthearted nature in which it was intended. Within moments, the game was on and all was fine (well, except the outcome!).
Game Changers also has the somewhat bizarre policy – bizarre to us, anyway – of switching the sound around to several games. Whenever a team gets in the Red Zone, suddenly the sound changes to that game. After a few mimosas and 2-for-1 Stellas, tho, it proved not to be annoying.
But hey, we walked in not going what to expect and walked out saying, like General MacArthur, that we will return.
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