If you’re on any kind of schedule, you should probably avoid Ben Michael’s restaurant on even a half-busy evening. The slow-moving spectacle that often passes for service will be frustrating if there’s some other place you need to be. But if you aren’t in a hurry, that same chaos could pass as entertainment. And if you show up during a quiet lunch hour and you’re the only one there, expect to be treated like royalty.

The chickens are laying again, the greens and onions are up, and the days are getting longer: Brunch season is here. I've been practicing a simple dish of poached eggs served on a bed of spinach and asparagus, garnished with crispy pieces of salt pork or bacon. Sometimes I drench the whole business in a blanket of hollandaise sauce. Or more often, it’s a blanket of failed hollandaise that I resurrect to perfection with mayonnaise and a microwave.

The age-old debate over which came first seems close to being resolved in favor of the chicken. After years of hens being treated as little more than egg-dispensers, concern is rising for the well-being of the layers themselves. Meanwhile, the practice of personal flock-keeping is on the upswing. Across the country, and in many parts of the world, chicken-first approaches are supplanting the simple quest to create the cheapest eggs possible.

When news broke on July 7 that United Egg Producers had struck a deal with longtime nemesis the Humane Society of the United States, a lot of people had to check and make sure they weren't reading The Onion by mistake. The surprise announcement drew gasps of "stunning," "historic" and "landmark" from observers in the food and agriculture community. The often bitter antagonists appear to have buried the hatchet, at least temporarily, and not up each other's bottoms. Gary Truitt, in Hoosier Ag Today, wrote: "Unprecedented does not do the situation justice."

Come for the emissions testing, come back for the duck soup. That's the brilliant business model that almost was, but isn't. It turns out 2000 Vietnam Restaurant and Saigon Express Emissions Testing, in an attached garage on Zuni and San Mateo, are separate businesses. But I'm still coming back for the duck soup.

Corinne Tippett never cared one way or the other about chickens. She harbored no childhood dreams of becoming a farmer, an egg seller or a butcher. But one day in 2004, without much planning, the Northern New Mexico resident found herself with a roost full of more than 100 birds—chicken, ducks, geese, quail, pheasants and a myriad of other tiny, feathered hatchlings.

Two of our hens recently got broody. While the other two kept up their standard schedules of scratching around, chasing bugs and rolling in the dust, Black ’n Blue, a sweet little Bantam, and Annabelle, a tough orange Buff Orpington, stopped laying eggs and glued themselves to their nesting box. Once in a while Baldy or Chicken Hawk came in to lay an egg and forfeit her creation to the broody girls, who used their beaks and claws to roll the new egg onto their pile. They shared this pile, sitting side by side, sometimes with their wings wrapped around each other. They wouldn't leave the nest to eat or drink, so I put food and water dishes next to the nesting box.