Paul Goebert's Austrian bistro is all the rage in Park Slope for its fine yet affordable dinners. The brightly painted and pleasantly noisy room feels busy yet intimate. Patrons are a neighborhood mix of casually dressed couples, pairs of couples, and young families. In the fall of 1997, Max's talent at pairing great food with poor brunch service, both in kitchen pacing and among the tables, gave birth to these reviews, to this mission to find the perfect eggs Benedict experience. Four years later, the service has improved tremendously, aside from slow plate-clearing.

Brunch comes with good coffee, served hot and refreshed often, and with some sourdough rolls and butter. The $4, medium-size mimosas use pulpless fresh juice from cartons, but they are very cold and have a lot of usually excellent champagne. The $4, small bloody Mary is not spicy but has the pleasant and complex blend of spices that evoke a hint of clam juice. Appetizers are tasty. Steamed mussels in peppery, asparagus-and-fennel broth are delicious.

On my most recent visit, the $8.50 eggs Benedict was almost excellent -- English muffins well toasted on the grill, lightly grilled Canadian bacon, well-poached eggs, and lots of lemony and buttery hollandaise blanketed with parsley. The grilled half of a large plum tomato was a colorful and flavorful transition between the fattier food on the plate and the viniagrette-tossed salad greens. A $2.50 side dish of bacon was hot and cooked perfectly between chewy and crunchy. But a charbroiled-burger flavor from an apparently undercleaned grill marred the muffins, Canadian bacon, and strip bacon. I love charbroiled burgers, and Max & Moritz doesn't even offer then, but that's a lunch taste, not a brunch taste.

Rest rooms: Two phone-both-size, dim, single-seater rest rooms.
Handicapped accessibility: Rest room doors are narrow.