http://www.ellassanfrancisco.com/
Place: Ella's ~ Neo Classical American Cooking
Location: 500 Presidio Avenue (at California Street)
Hours: open for breakfast Monday - Friday at 7:00am; open for "Brunch" Saturday and Sunday at 8:30am
Meal: potato scramble with grilled fennel, roasted beets, lemon roasted onion, and havarti ~ with eggs added; and a glass of ginger orange juice punch
(There is one thing that I have always wondered, sure, Ella fits Gerald, but is Gerald really right for Ella, too?)
Continuing working my way through my Breakfastary Starting Rotation for the Summer, I went back to Ella's. Even though they open up early enough on the weekends, they still feel the need to call their early morning meal ~ "Brunch". It all tastes like breakfast to me.
Once again I sat at the counter overlooking the kitchen area. This was the first time in a long time that the restaurant wasn't jam-packed with a long line outside the door waiting to get in. They weren't even half-full (or half-empty, if you want to be a bit more optimistic about it) by the time I had finished eating; I don't think that I have ever seen them that un-busy before.
There was a sign in the window (you know one of those signs that the city makes them put up) that stated there were new owners taking over. I think that the last new ownership was probably five years ago now.
Ella's only has about a dozen items from which to choose on their weekend "Brunch" menu; however, it changes mostly every weekend, so it is always interesting to see what they are offering. Today there were a few other good seasonal-ingredient ideas: open faced omelette (with bacon, cherry tomatoes, grilled sweet corn, fresh thyme, and gouda); folded omelette (with jerked breast of chicken, asparagus, arugula mint pesto, and havarti); or italian benedict (pesto biscuit, proscuitto, poached eggs, and a roasted tomato hollandaise). Of course, I would have gotten any of those specials without the awful offending dead, decaying animal offal.
There is no real reason to make a huge foofaraw about this morning's selection, but grilled fennel and roasted beets simply trumps asparagus (which happens to be one of my favourite of the needle-like cladodes fruit group, too) or roasted tomato Hollandaise (I was intrigued to see what that may have looked and tasted like). This happened to be one of the better potato scramble combinations that I have had there in a while (and they are all generally very good, anyway). And I was very pleased to see that this was made with lots of barbabietole and finocchio[1], Mastro Geppetto. For my toast choice I once again had the honey-oat-raisin; it is really a very good, home-made (restaurant-made, whatever) bread.
For condimentary supplements, Ella's only offers Tabasco® Brand Pepper Sauce (both the standard red and green jalapeño). I had come prepared again (with the same bottles of hot sauce that I didn't need yesterday) and used some Born to Hula presents Devon Allman's All Natural Hot Sauce Chipotle Blues (Thanks, Kerry!) on about 2/3 of the pile and some El Yucateco® XXXtra Hot Sauce Salsa Kutbil-ik® de Chile Habanero (Thanks, Brian!) on the other 1/3 of the pile. I was impressed with how well the El Yucateco® really went with the fennel flavour, too.
Glen Bacon Scale Rating: potato scramble ~ 7.0
1. Stupid, useless cunning linguist pointer of the day:
I asked my Mexican waiter-server-guy how to say "fennel" in Spanish and he told me it was just "anís"; however, I looked it up and I think a more correct translation would be "hinojo". "Anís" would be the translation of "anise". They are close in flavour, but no "cigaro".
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