Saturday, August 21, 2010

The Liberty Café and Bakery

Liberté, Égalité, Petit Déjeuner*


The Liberty* Café/Cafe** and Bakery is located over atop Bernal Heights, not exactly the easiest place to get to in the City, but still well worth the trouble.

http://www.thelibertycafe.com/index.html

I ate out in their garden patio, which is situated between the main restaurant, "the Café", and "the Cottage" (but not referred to as "le chalet" for some reason), which also serves as the main bakery. For a little while, I had the entire patio space to myself, as no one else was stupid enough to want to eat outside that early in the morning ~ there was just one lone dog waiting patiently for his humans to come out of the bakery. I asked the waitress and she said that they do bake special doggie biscuits once in a while ~ I noticed that he didn't get any though (cheapo humans). I didn't even need the umbrellas opened for shade as even the Sun had better sense than to try to break through… I probably coulda used one of the umbrellas to keep the small amount of mist/fog that was still present off, though.



I had the Veggie Omelette (a veritable breakfast fit for the U.N.) ~ "Swiss" chard, Portobello (which I believe is Italiano for "very tasty fungus") mushroom, roasted red onion, "Monterey" Jack cheese; with country (they did not specify as to which was the country of origin) potatoes and "English" muffin (as opposed to "muffin français"). This was a nice combo of stuff, but I think "Swiss" cheese might have paired better with the entire omelette, not to mention it would have bookended the "Swiss" chard very nicely. The home fries/country potatoes (or pommes de terre, even) were very good, just not enough of 'em in my opinion (how do you say "skimpy" en français?).

I rounded out the meal with a fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice and a good, strong cuppa coffee***. They serve the English muffins with their own homemade mixed berry jam (the fruit combinations change with the whims of the person making the jams weekly); it was very good and would also be great on some of their fresh baked goods ~ which would have made the meal even better, instead of what seemed like just plain ol' store-bought English muffins (I found this very strange for a place that has its own bakery on site).




They only offer regular ol' red Tabasco®, and I had forgotten to bring any of my own stash this morning.****


Glen Bacon Scale Rating: Veggie Omelette et al ~ 6.8


*(I just figured any Patrick Henry references would have seemed a bit too obvious and corn-ballish… and that is the actual technical term, I should know as I just made it up and forced my Microsoft® auto-spellchecker thingy to remember it.)


**(The outside signage is sans accent aigu; however, their on-line menu is avec accent aigu ~ so take your pick... or piqué?)


***(While sipping my cuppa joe, I had this great idea for a coffee-flavoured toothpaste. Think about it. Have you ever just brushed your teeth and then drank a cup of coffee? It has the most horrid, pepperminty/spearminty tang to it. So, why not just cut to the chase and make the toothpaste coffee-flavoured to begin with? I believe this is an even better idea than mayonnaise-fed tuna, Michael Keaton!) 


****(Completely unrelated useless cunning linguist story of the day:


The English word "robot" comes from the Czech word for "work", "robota", which is a similar word in many other Slavic languages. It was introduced in a science fiction play by Czech writer Karel Čapek in 1920. He chose the word "robot" to describe the automatons being made in a factory. 


The word for "work" in Russian is "
работа" pronounced "raBOTa". Now here is the really strange part, the word for "robot" in Russian is "робот" and pronounced “RObat” and is taken from the Czech word. This may be one of the only instances where the Russians ever borrowed anything from the Czechs… well, that, and their freedom from 1945-1990.)

2 comments:

  1. You say "работа," I say "робато." The Russians are good at borrowing things.

    ReplyDelete