Breakfast places in Ventura

Here's another article I wrote for my food writing class. It's a guide to breakfaat in Ventura:

It’s the smells, the sweetness of pancakes and syrup, the tang of orange, the bitterness of coffee, the savory eggs and potatoes, that make a great breakfast as comforting and satisfying as a warm hug on a cold day. You’d think it would be easy, after all breakfasts tend to be fairly easy in concept, but as anyone knows who has had a disappointing plate of rubbery, cold bacon and congealed eggs served with leaden pancakes, it’s not so hard to make a bad breakfast.

A great breakfast needs to throw dietary considerations to the wind, which is why they should at most, be a once-a-week treat. Weekend breakfasts are a time-honored tradition, allowing for lingering over a cup of hot coffee with toast and the newspaper.

Ventura is a breakfast Mecca in the county. There are so many great breakfasts available, it’s almost impossible to list them all. This is more or less a list of just-breakfast places, that focus on the morning meal and in most cases also serve lunch: The kind of place that closes at 2 p.m. each day.

Pete’s Breakfast House is a local favorite and there are long lines each weekend morning. They serve up a great, traditional breakfast, but the charm of Pete’s is the casual “Everybody knows your name” atmosphere, where regulars shout greetings to people behind the counters. People rave about the omelettes, and the pancakes and waffles are very popular.

Allison’s Country Café is also popular with the weekend crowds. With its emphasis on their light, fluffy biscuits served with homemade raspberry jam that is available by the jar, this is a delightful, homey restaurant that is country without pretense or artifice. The menu focuses on eggs, waffles and hotcakes, along with the legendary biscuits.

Golden Egg Café is right down the street from Pete’s, which seems kind of a shame because it has never really had a chance to be considered on its own merits. There are outdoor tables available, which are pet-friendly. The menu features basic breakfast food and the bacon is thick and very nicely cured.

Art’s Corner Café focuses on customers. So much so that caricatures of regulars, drawn by area artist Chris Martinez line the walls. Art prides himself on his soft, fluffy pancakes and the French toast is the old-fashioned thin sliced bread kind. The chile verde is also featured, as well as really large portions of eggs, potatoes, bacon, sausage and ham.

Eggs N Things is a small Ventura County chain that is well-known by locals. They serve every customer a small Swedish pancake that’s served with a dollop of boysenberry jam. The eggs benedict can be a bit uneven, with eggs arriving at random stages of doneness. But the food is very good overall.

Café Nouveau has been discovered and it’s not going well. The delightful breakfast restaurant located in an old, renovated house with an exquisite outdoor patio is wonderful if you catch it at the right time. The menu is good, with breakfast burritos, eggs, French toast – the thick kind, but the service is quite spotty and can be downright rude. The lines on the weekend are long and the wait staff gets so flustered that they have trouble filling orders.

Franky’s Restaurant was long a Ventura favorite. But under new ownership, it's a shell of its former self, with a truncated menu and the elimination of the iconic fountain. The old staff is gone as is the tomato/basil dressing. The menu focuses on healthier choices.