What You See is What You Eat.

I don’t like paying a lot for breakfast because it’s stuff I generally can make at home; at the same time, it’s probably my favorite meal to go out for when I can. There’s something lovely about lounging around at the beginning of the day, eating, talking, and contemplating the hopes and plans for the rest of the day, rather than bitching over dinner about the regrets and anger about that assignment you should have taken at work because you badly need the billable hours. Welcome, Huckleberry!!

Huckleberry Cafe is the bakery/day-time offspring of Rustic Canyon and its James Beard-nominated pastry chef, Zoe Nathan.  This place has been in the works for a while; along with Santa Monica Seafood a few doors down, we’ve been busy with excitement over their simultaneous openings. I’ve been particularly excited about Huckleberry, because Santa Monica severely lacks in solid breakfast fare. Don’t give me the overpriced Bread and Porridge; Snug Harbor is meh; and Swingers is good but typical. The openings of these places also were a nice distraction from yet another shit week at work, this time infused with potential layoff politics. I wanted to start a pool to place bets on the date that they will announce the bloodshed; so far, no takers.

Back to the more important topic: food. In the tradition of all things beachside, the cafe is super airy with lots of natural light.  I really like that.  A huge menu showcases breakfast items (pancakes and eggs), and a huge counter showcases their pastries.  A lot of pastries.

We got there around 9:30am on Saturday, usually a decent time to get breakfast around here, but it was already mad with activity, with all manners of white people and their families at every nook and cranny of the cafe.  Other than one Asian woman, we again were the only non-white people there.  I guess all the rest of the Asians were over at Amandine. We got into the huge line and surveyed the menu – for brunch, it goes from $8 for two soft-boiled eggs all the way to $12 for brisket, “green” eggs and ham, and poached eggs.   Coffee is $2.75.  Whenever substantive breakfast choices top $10 and the coffee is over $2 … well, you’re starting to pay lunch and even dinner prices, just for breakfast.  That’s dangerous.

I chose the fried egg sandwich – bacon, gruyere, arugula, and ailoi – ($9.50 – $9.50!  I had to double check my receipt; I thought it was $8.50).  The girlfriend ordered the “green” eggs and ham with prosciutto on a house-made English muffin ($12).  No coffee for me, I draw the line at paying more than $2.25 for a cup of house brew, and that is only if I expect to stay there all there and reap the benefits of the free refills.

The fried egg sandwich:

Other than the bread, there isn’t a whole of of substance here – the bacon slices were not that big, so you ended up with essentially a very well-done (as in, cooked perfectly) egg atop some greens and a big chunk of bread.  The problem here is that you got too much of the bread, as if that were an acceptable substitute for meat, which it’s not.  To its credit, the bread was nice, thick, crusty, and substantively soft. It was great on its own.   I ended up taking off the top slice and eating this like an open-faced sandwich.  Overall, good, but not great.  The egg sandwich at The Kitchen is ten times better.

This was the better dish: the “green” eggs and ham:

Turns out the “green” eggs and ham are actually eggs topped with pesto! The prosciutto and can’t-stop-eating-it English muffin is what did us in. This is one that made me rethink my taste buds for a second – are English muffins supposed to taste like this? Chewy, light, marshmellowy. And, unlike the bacon over on my sandwich, the amount of prosciutto here was surprisingly very generous. (So generous, in fact, that we took some off and added it to the fried egg sandwich. That made it much better.). The pesto itself didn’t add a whole lot, but it was good.

We figured it out during our meal – Huckleberry is a lot like Clementine over in Century City, with its excellent pastries and sandwiches in a cute cafe setting. There are not enough of these types of places in this city in general, so I’m grateful to have it here. Even more than that, I find Clementine to be a bit stuffy, the service absurdly slow, and the people indifferent and dismal, so having Huckleberry so near is nice. Unfortunately, both are expensive, though Huckleberry still has the upper hand: the portions are much, much bigger than the less-than-Oprah’s-fist-sized meals that you get at Clementine. I’m definitely going back to the try out the rest of the pastries and mayyyybe for lunch (sandwiches are over $10, and a whole roasted chicken is overpriced at $23), but probably not anytime soon just for breakfast – it’s a bit much more than I’m willing to pay for that first meal of the day. (Not others though; people were shelling out $30+, even at these early hours! Does this say more about : 1) the lack of great bakeries in Santa Monica; 2) the surprising non-effects of the recession on some people, me included (so far); or 3) both?). This leaves me in the same spot I was before Huckleberry opened – without a solid, relatively inexpensive breakfast joint on this side of town. Oh, how I miss The Kitchen. Sigh.

Huckleberry
1014 Wilshire Blvd
Santa Monica
Wed-Sun 8am-4pm