Brown Sugar Kitchen, West Oakland, Oakland, CA.
“All of the Above,” aka:
Two eggs (over easy)
Green salad (sub for breakfast potatoes)
Acme wheat toast
Niman Ranch ham
& an espresso
I don’t know what it is about this place. Thoroughly agnostic as I am, I’m skeptical of any restaurant that proclaims its food has soul, much less new soul. Previously, I’d journeyed here for a pulled pork sandwich, and despite its West Oakland trappings, found the food as whitey-whitewashed as T-Rex BBQ, though with less gusto, far less satisfying macaroni and cheese and a dearth of whiskey. It was so uneventful (and me, so lazy) that I didn’t bother writing about it.
Service was tepid, aloof, and proceeded at its own pace, which is to say it was egregiously slow, given the dining room’s emptiness and my order’s simplicity. If you’re going to spend twenty minutes making toast and over easy eggs, at least have my espresso arrive sooner than halfway through the process. When the food did arrive, the eggs were SOLID and decidedly past medium. The salad was woefully overdressed, any crisp freshness smothered by strangely lumpy vinaigrette, as if someone tried to pull a fast one on “creamy balsamic” by incorporating something gelatinous. The espresso was the typical broad-appeal Blue Bottle shot: heavy mouthfeel, laden with crema, impossibly robust but lacking finesse, i.e., will happily take a gallon of milk but still taste the same.
Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, the meal was saved by one of the hallmarks of California cuisine: quality ingredients. The toast was perfect due to the inherent wondrousness of Acme bread; the lightly smoked, meaty but lean Niman Ranch ham was redemption from every serving of briny pressed meats I’d consumed in my youth. But what good is simplicity when you can’t even get my order right? Resigned to my fate, I constructed a fried egg and ham sandwich, which would have been cheaper (and cheesier) to order in the first place.
It was $12 with an adequate tip that they didn’t really deserve. Should’ve made the trek to 900 Grayson instead. I will give BSK another shot for the sake of chicken and waffles; I don’t know why I keep avoiding the restaurant’s signature dish. Lowering my expectations, perhaps?
P.S. – Delicious espresso can be found in Mountain View, of all places. Get thee to Dana Street Roastery and have a shot, preferably made from Yemen Moka (refined but not constrained, with layers upon layers of flavor), preferably pulled by the affable gentleman sporting the handlebar mustache, preferably in a delightfully dry macchiato.
