Ella's

"The one with the potato scramble with grilled asparagus tips, balsamic onions, sautéed mushrooms, and gouda cheese."

http://www.ellassanfrancisco.com/


Place: Ella's Neo Classical American Cooking
Location: 500 Presidio Avenue (on the corner of California Street)
Hours: open for breakfast Monday through Friday at 7:00am; open for "Brunch" Saturday and Sunday at 8:30am
Meal: potato scramble with grilled asparagus tips, balsamic onions, sautéed mushrooms, and gouda cheese ~ with two over-medium eggs laid (placed) on top; and a glassa Ginger Orange Juice Punch

(Does it get any better than early Autumn and the pitch-perfection of Lady Ella?! [Ol' Satchelmouth ain't so bad himself neither.])


Because it is early Autumn (well, almost) and nearing the end of the Regular Baseball Season (Go Red Sox and Giants!!!), I figured this was as good a time as any to work my way through my Breakfastary Starting Rotation one last time for the year. So, I headed back over to Ella's Neo Classical American Cooking 
(see last 'blog-entry from Saturday, April 9th, 2016).

Ella's does not have a standard "Brunch" menu; it changes every weekend and highlights whatever is seasonal. Their weekend menu is really not that extensive (usually twelve to fifteen items from which to choose) and even less-so for stupid vegetarian choices. This weekend's other offerings that I might have gone with were:

orange-yogurt pancakes with gingered pear compote (in case you haven't noticed, Ella's likes to type their menu-entries in the minuscule); 

open faced omelette with bacon, grilled onions, avocados, sun dried tomato, chives, and goat cheese (I liked the sound of this one and would have ordered it without the bacon);

folded omelette with grilled chicken breast, roasted garlic, diced tomatoes, and white cheddar cheese (I also would have 86-ed the poultry product);

breakfast burrito ~ with house made chorizo, black beans, tomato relish, ranchero sauce, and monterey jack cheese (again, I would have had to ochenta-y-seis-ed la salchicha de cerdo muerto en descomposición);

or 

kale salad ~ olive oil-softened kale slices with sliced grape tomatoes, roasted almond slivers, Feta (Sorry, there is never any reason for "Feta" to be in the minuscule!) cheese, and housemade strawberry vinaigrette (this was going to be my second back-up choice; and if I had gone with this one, I would have asked if they could have laid [placed] a couple of poached eggs[1] on the top of the heap).

I mainly went with this choice because asparagus trumps (or hillaries, even) sun-dried tomatoes and avocado any day. However, kale + Feta was a tough one to pass-up, but I have already had Feta several times in the past few weeks in my breakfast dishes and knew that I wouldn't miss it for one day. I was happy to see that there was a very good amount of asparagus in the dish, too. Many places will say they have asparagus in the description and then go all cheapo-bastage on you and include maybe one spear entirely. I have yet to have had a bad potato scramble combination at this place. I was skeptical at first with Gouda as the cheese choice, but it worked very nicely with all the other ingredients and provided a nice melty-gooey base.

For my choice of toast, I did the boring (but sensible and very tasty) selection of their house baked (well, restaurant/bakery-baked) honey oat raisin bread. I made sure to apply several spoonfuls of their good homemade (well, restaurant-made) strawberry jam/preserves on the slices, too.

For condimentary supplementation, Ella's only has Tabasco® Brand Pepper Sauce, both Original Red Sauce and Green Jalapeño Pepper Sauce. I used some of my own Hot Licks® Serrano Hot Sauce (Thanks, Brian!) on top of one of the eggs and some Golden Pagoda Jalapeño Hot Sauce (Thanks, Mom!) on top of the other egg. (Unfortunately, if I had forgotten to bring any of my own hot sauces with me this morning, I wouldn't be able to blame it on Sean again.)


Glen Bacon Scale Rating: 
potato scramble with grilled asparagus tips, balsamic onions, sautéed mushrooms, and gouda cheese ~ 6.8

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1. For about five years after becoming a stupid vegetarian, I would not eat any cooked eggs by themselves (exempla gratia: scrambled, omelettes, quiches, soft/hard-boiled, sunny-side up, over-medium, fried, eggsetera*), but I would eat cakes and other baked goods that had eggs as an ingredient in them. A very sage (or parsely) friend that was stationed with me in Greece at the time informed me that as a "rabbit-food-eater" (and those were probably his exact words ~ there may have been an expletive-deleted or two attached to the phrase) I should go back to eating eggs to supplement the lack of protein-intake in my diet. Back then, most of my protein would have come from milk-products ("Everything's betta with Feta!"™). Keep in mind that this was wayyyy back in the early 80's when there was no such thing as Tofurky® and you try finding any tofu in a Greek αγορά; plus, I didn't "discover" hummus until a few years later while still living in Greece. 

Thanks once again, for the good advice and push in the right direction, Doug!

*(Okay, maybe that was an awful lot of work just to use that silly pun.)