Ro Cafe

Breakfast on Geary (redux), Part 28

(No official web-site thing.)


Place: Ro Cafe[1]
Location: 2739 Geary Boulevard (between Masonic Avenue and Wood Street); phonicular contact: (415) 340-9765
Hours: open at 7:00am every day (however, this might be questionable; with no actual web-site to confirm the times, I have to rely on the Intro-Net and the times seem to differ with some sources)
Meal: Scrambled Egg Sandwich ~ cheese, eggs, zucchini, bell pepper, onion, Ro sauce; some kinda carrot-blueberry(?) pastry thing; and a medium (12 oz) cuppa America's Best Coffee Roasting Company House Blend

http://www.ambestcoffee.com/

(Today's EweToobular juxtaselction is simply from the coffehouse's name, or, at least, I hope that is so.)


Ro Cafe used to be located over on California Street in the little corner location where ★ The ★ Richfield is now located (see 'blog-entry from October 17th, 2015). I think that I had only stopped in to the old joint once or twice before. They have been at this new(er) and large(r) location now for about four months. It is definitely larger than their old space, but not really by much. There is just seating of eight tables for two, with two additional chairs on each side of an electric fireplace-hearth thing. I like how it is in a cool, sun-room kinda spot at the bottom/front of an old Victorian (Are there really any "new" Victorians?).

From the items offered on the breakfast menu (and the standard menu), I am pretty sure that I will be making future visits back to Ro Cafe. A couple of other (stupid vegetarian-friendly) breakfast sandwich selections that caught my eye (both of them, actually), were: Avocado Egg (avocado, fried egg, toasted bread[2]); Morning Fresh (cream cheese, pepper, onion, mint, cucumber, yogurt; how all this can be made into a sandwich, I have no idea, but anything that sounds like a Tzatziki sandwich is alright with me); or Sthara (jam, cream cheese, baby spinach, Mozzarella; this is another strange combination of ingredients, and one that I am sure I will like). They also have a nice offering of bagels with interesting toppings (e.g. hummus, avocado, capers, sundried tomatoes, and, especially, their signature Ro sauce).

Two items that really aren't of the breakfastary category are Vash (sp? I am not exactly sure what this is, but the counter-lady person said it was suitable for stupid vegetarians; she also told me what was in it, but I forgot to write it down) and Kurdish Couscous (salad) ~ couscous, pepper, tomato paste, onion, parsley, tomato, cucumber, lemon. Both of these I know that I will like a lot. 

I am not exactly sure what the pastry thing was. I thought the counter-lady person said "carrot-blueberry". She did inform/warn me that it was not really a "sweet" pastry. That was okay with me. It looked good and I am happy to say that it also tasted good. There was a sign in the display case stating that their pastries are (coffee)homemade and baked fresh daily. Otherwise, I was going to go with a piece of Kurdish baklava (also [coffee]homemade); the sign stated that these weren't as sweet as normal baklava (I don't see how that could be as they were oozing honey) and are made with a little lemon added to them. Next time, I am getting one of those.

The size of this sandwich alone puts that Eggamuffin thing from Ronald's Rainbow Room to shame. That it included a good amount of fresh sliced zucchini (and other fresh ingredients) only added to the quality. Unfortunately, like most coffeehouses, the scrambled eggs were nuked in a microwave to be cooked. (Yes, I feel the same way about microwave ovens as I do mobular devices.) The Ro sauce was a great find here and worth a return visit all on its lonesome; it was not really that spicy, but it was very tasty and I made sure to use-up the entire small ramekin that was provided.

I didn't bother to check what Ro Cafe might offer in the way of condimentary supplementation. I had come with a few of my own hot sauces, but it really didn't matter, as their Ro sauce was more than condimentarily sufficient.


Glen Bacon Scale Rating: Scrambled Egg Sandwich ~ 6.4 (6.6 factoring in the most excellent Ro sauce); carrot-blueberry(?) pastry thing ~ 6.4

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1. Stupid, useless cunning linguist pointer of the day:

I had to ask the counter-lady person what the name of the coffeehouse meant. She told me that "Ro" means "river" in Kurdish. (I am pretty sure that the "Cafe" part of the name just means "café".)

However, I can neither confirm nor deny this with either Google Translate or bing Translator* because neither of them offer an English-Kurdish (any of the three major dialects) or Kurdish-English selection. This seems completely unfathomable to me, as there are 20-30 million native speakers of Kurdish worldwide. (Apparently none of them use
Google or bing.) 

This is a shame, too, for I was planning on making several more "stupid, useless cunning linguist pointers" with Kurdish-to-English words. I did ask the counter-lady person how to say "Coffee" in Kurdish and it sounds something close to "Kawa" or "Kava", I believe. Coffee is a pretty universal word after all.

*(However, bing Translator does offer two [yes, 2!] Klingon options. Seriously. What I can only surmise from this is that there must be more than 20-30 million native speakers of Klingon using the Intro-Net.)

2. "Toasted bread" must be Kurdish for "toast". Maybe this ain't such a hard language to master after all.