Lucky Penny Coffee Shop

… because "Felicitous Miss Blankenship Café" was already taken[1]



(No web-site available.)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThdCEVhOPvM

(I know I could have linked "Tom’s Diner" by Suzanne Vega as a better EweToob-y lead-in, but I wanted to save that for when/if I ever go to the real one in New York City, Mr. Costanza.)


This was another olde-timey diner place that I have driven by hundreds of times and had never stopped in to try: Lucky Penny Coffee Shop. It is located at the corner of Geary Boulevard and Masonic Avenue, where the Inner Richmond District, Laurel Heights, and the Western Addition kind of meld. They are open 24 hours, every day, which is getting harder and harder to find in San Francisco. ("World-Class City", my ass! More like "Only an 18-hour Class City".) It has been in the same location for at least twenty-five years that I know, and probably opened another twenty-five years before that even.

Embedded pennies adorn the countertop; I didn't check every single one, but they all appear to be "heads up", luckily. They were showing an old 1940's-1950's Black-and-White movie on the TeeVees above the diner counter when I first sat down (it was one that I had never seen and really couldn't place a few of the somewhat familiar faces). They serve breakfast all day long and have a decent enough selection from which to choose. I went with the simple Vegetarian Omelette ~ tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, mushrooms, (<-- note additional and grammatically correct comma[2]) and Monterey Jack cheese; with hashbrowns (they actually offer a choice of either hashbrowns or pancakes, which I thought was nice) and sourdough toast; and I also had a cuppa their diner-style coffee.



There was nothing either terrible or really special about this omelette; it was good and huge, and much better than any effort I have ever made at a decent omelette; plus it had lots of Monterey Jack cheesy goodness throughout it. The coffee was about what I expected diner coffee to be: black, hot, and always another refill, if you can handle it.

As would be expected at a diner-style place, Lucky Penny offers ketchup and Tabasco® (the standard red) as condimentary supplementation. I kinda figured as much and used some Trees Can't Dance ~ African Hot Sauce (Thanks, Cindy and Greg!) on the potatoes and some Benito's Original Naranja (Thanks, me!) on the omelette.


Glen Bacon Scale Rating: Vegetarian Omelette ~ 6.2


[1] There are probably only about two people (out of the multitude of tens) who read this 'blog who will get that little joke/salutation.

[2] Completely boring, stupid, and useless grammar/punctuation pointer of the day:

You would be surprised at how many times the additional comma before an "and" or "or" is omitted. I am no Mr. Prentice (nor Mr. Hall, even), but I was always told that one "should use commas to separate three or more words, phrases, or clauses that form a coordinate series" (such as this one and the one used in the first sentence of this subparagraph).