The latest addition to Mobile’s Old Shell Road Brunch Corridor is now open and roaring with business.

A dining companion and I realized that right up front in our first visit to the Toasted Yolk, newly opened at the intersection of Old Shell and Upham Street. We’d decided that hitting the place at 9 a.m. on a weekday would put us there after the breakfast rush, with plenty of parking and tables available. And we were kind of right, in the sense that we had no trouble finding a parking spot or a table.

But if the rush had faded, it wasn’t by much. Apparently a lot of people in Midtown Mobile are at liberty to dally over a late breakfast on a supposed workday.

It was announced late last summer that The Toasted Yolk was coming to 2066 Old Shell Road, the longtime home of Fuego, a Midtown favorite that had closed in spring 2022. From the beginning, the plan generated keen interest. And perhaps a certain amount of skepticism.

Some wondered if the area needed another breakfast-brunch-lunch spot, given that a Big Bad Breakfast had opened near the Dew Drop Inn in summer 2022, and that Ashland Midtown Pub, even closer at 2543 Old Shell Road, is known for a killer Sunday brunch. If you’re coming from the other direction, options in Spring Hill include the Maple Street Biscuit Co. next to Lavretta Park.

More recently, there was some concern around the decision to paint the brick building white with black trim. It looks great, and judging from the intensity of he work done before it was painted, the new owners addressed some infrastructure issues that had developed over the years.

Walk in now, and you find yourself in a fresh, new-feeling space. It’s bright, clean, open, cheery – and loud. I wasn’t kidding when I said The Toasted Yolk was roaring with business. This isn’t an uncommon issue, but if it’s one that bothers you, try hard not to visit at a peak time.

Other than that, you probably won’t find much to gripe about. The service was attentive and faster than anything I expected. On this breakfast visit, I was hoping to be done in 45 minutes. We were in and out in 30.

The basic breakfast menu – well, there’s nothing basic about it. Akin to Big Bad and Maple Street, The Toasted Yolk is all about taking ideas you know and love and probably could do for yourself at home, and overdoing them with flair. Case in point: My eye went straight to the Cowboy Scramble ($15.99) and stuck there, so that’s what I had to order.

The concept of burying a couple of biscuits in everything you have on hand and pouring gravy over it is nothing new. This execution, however was excellent. The two split buttermilk biscuits were “covered with bacon, sausage, ham, onions and three scrambled eggs topped with sausage gravy.” And it wasn’t just a big pile of calories: The biscuits remained fluffy and I could distinctly taste the three kinds of meat in there because the gravy wasn’t an all-engulfing sludge. The tiny token fruit cup was balanced by a portion of hashbrown casserole heavy on the cheese.

My companion, a man of large appetites, was similarly drawn to something called the Southern Fried Arnold ($16.49). In Toasted Yolk parlance, the Arnolds are variations on eggs Benedict. The Southwestern version has jalapenos and queso, the Alaskan has salmon and spinach, and so on the Southern Fried Arnold puts its two poached eggs atop biscuit halves rather than English muffin halves, and slabs of fried chicken rather than Canadian bacon. And of course it uses country sausage gravy rather than hollandaise sauce.

I think he ordered in part because he wanted to see if The Toasted Yolk actually knew how to poach an egg: The very first thing he did when it arrived was to spear one to see if the yolk was overdone. It wasn’t, and he went on to praise the dish for having the best poached eggs he’d encountered in a while. He found the gravy a little too mild and felt the need to add salt, pepper and tobacco, but to each his own.

Both of us left with leftovers in hand, and we had left much of the breakfast menu untouched. The Toasted Yolk offers a fine selection of omelets; several sandwiches, including the namesake Toasted Yolk, which has an egg in the middle of each slab of sourdough; brisket tacos and a three-egg burrito; pancakes, French toast and waffles; shrimp and grits; ham & eggs or a pork chop breakfast; and a few “sweet bookends” such as “churro style” donuts.

Even given the magnitude of our failure, when I returned it was to sample the lunch menu. It’s not quite as large but does pack “junkyard fries,” a variety of sandwiches including a half-pound burger and a patty melt and several appropriately decadent salads.

I went with the California Club ($15.59), a gratifyingly messy pile of “Piled-high Cajun turkey layered with thick-cut bacon, sliced avocado, lettuce, tomato, with honey mustard and Swiss cheese on grilled, wholegrain berrywheat.” Much like the Cowboy Scramble, it managed to make all that seem less heavy in subjective terms than it almost certainly was in objective ones.

As I ate it, I studied the dining room. It was loud, as before. One wall features the neon motto, “It’s never too early to get toasted.” Trust us, we know, we do Mardi Gras here. But what caught my eye was the number of staff on the floor. It was like trying to count fish on the move, but at times I could see as many as 15 employees at work in the customer space, counting hostess, bartender, managers, and many servers.

If you’re really, really tired of waiting in understaffed restaurants, you probably will not mind the volume level here.

And while The Toasted Yolk might currently be benefiting from being the newest thing on the breakfast and brunch scene, it backs it up with the freshness and flair of its food. It doesn’t seem like the novelty is likely to wear off any time soon.

The Toasted Yolk is at 2066 Old Shell Road. It’s part of a chain with about 40 locations, mostly in the Southeast and more than a dozen listed as “coming soon” on the company website. There’s a location in Dothan and plans to open one on 20th Street in Birmingham. For menus and other information, visit thetoastedyolk.com.