Food Fanatic: Bread and Porridge

Bread and Porridge
2315 Wilshire Blvd.
$10-$20

Brunch is the best meal of the day. It’s less pretentious
than dinner, and it offers the selection of lunch.

Plus, brunch includes those might-as-well-be-dessert foods
usually reserved for breakfast, without requiring you to wake up at
an uncivilized hour. (I’ve always felt that French toast,
pancakes and waffles are rewards for getting up early.) And brunch
is special because it’s rare; when else do you get to have
brunch except on weekends?

Before you resign yourself to another episode of lackluster De
Neve waffles, however, try Bread and Porridge.

Just 10 minutes west from Westwood on Wilshire Boulevard, Bread
and Porridge oddly has nothing to do with bread and porridge.

Instead, the weekend swarms order up scrumptious fruit pancakes
accompanied by one of seven different varieties of gourmet sausages
““ your pick.

I love fruit, but I find that most pancakes get repetitive fast
after the first bite. The pancakes here, chock-full of chocolate
chips, strawberries, pecans, and my favorite combo ““
blueberries and bananas ““ are the answers to my prayers.

“(There is) as much fruit as possible ““ we do that
intentionally,” says owner Mark Rothschild, who quit his
computer engineering job 11 years ago to enter the restaurant
business. “If we put any more, they’d fall
apart.”

He goes on, and I find it refreshing to meet someone whose
pancake philosophy aligns with mine.

“I don’t want to see (just) three blueberries … or
some artificial blueberry syrup ““ that’s junk,”
he said. “It’s blue, but then again a lot of
toothpastes are blue too, and there aren’t any blueberries in
that!”

The maple breakfast sausage is one of the restaurant’s
most popular dishes, but if you don’t order your own,
don’t make my mistake: I was forced to negotiate an exchange
rate with my friend, and it wasn’t in my favor.

I ended up trading three of my chicken-apple sausages for just
one of his little maple links. The pancake-and-sausage combo goes
for $11.70.

Bread and Porridge also offers omelets, salads, sandwiches,
entrees and pastas. But the one time I ordered an omelet instead of
pancakes, I found myself peering over my friends’ shoulders
with carb-envy, wishing I hadn’t been adventurous.

And so I’ve always believed that this is a pancake place
““ that is, until I went in for a formal tasting.

It turns out that Bread and Porridge also serves an
unforgettable goat-cheese-and-roasted-red-pepper sandwich.

I’m not usually a sandwich person at restaurants because I
can put together something just like it at home with minimal effort
and expense.

But I’m planning to make return visits to Bread and
Porridge for this sandwich’s explosion of colors and flavors.
The goat cheese grips you in its creaminess while not-too-salty
capers contribute bitter complexity. Fresh arugula tumbles off the
edges of delicately toasted whole wheat bread.

Lately I’ve developed a distaste for roasted red peppers.
When I buy them in grocery stores by the jar, they’re always
more oily than flavorful, so I’m surprised to find myself
picking runaway red peppers off my plate. I find out why when
Rothschild tells me that the labor-intensive process of making red
peppers is done on the premises.

“We first roast them over an open flame. Then we have to
peel them, slice them, and marinate them in … olive oil,”
he says.

Other excellent choices include the BBQ beef brisket sandwich,
which is smoked for 10 to 12 hours over hickory wood, and the set
of fish tacos, which has all the accoutrements of fish tacos from,
say, Rubio’s, but is made using fresh snapper that bursts
with flavor. All sandwiches go for around $10.

It’s a cozy space, so expect a wait on weekends and call
ahead to make same-day reservations. Make the wait bearable by
hanging out in the coffee lounge, a separate room housing an
archipelago of rich-brown leather couches and ottomans.

Other features that keep impatient patrons cheerful include free
Wi-Fi and a big, friendly, pumpkin-yellow door.

“We got the door at a junkyard and had it
refinished,” Rothschild said. “It’s from an old
mansion somewhere.”

Save Bread and Porridge for a lazy Sunday, because in my
experience, the pancakes, at least, have a way of putting you out
of commission for the day. They’re that good ““ or bad
““ depending on your goals for your post-brunch afternoon.

“When people leave, if they’re not smiling, we did
something wrong,” Rothschild says. “We don’t
think eating should be punishment.”

I refrain from commenting out loud that I feel slightly
punished, or at least deserving of punishment, every time I step
out of Bread and Porridge ““ but in a good way.

If you’re as nutty about blueberries as Hsu, e-mail
her at lhsu@media.ucla.edu.

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