Let’s Have a Pancake Party!
DISH: By David Nelson Photography by Martin Mann
Has is ever occurred to you that pancakes are the ideal food?
Packed with protein, carbohydrates, fats and other good stuff, they soak up syrup and paint smiles all around, even on cranky breakfasters. (Crafted into perfect circles and properly aged, they also make cheap substitutes for Frisbees.) Pancakes make you happy, just like the cheerful staff at Snooze, the new “A.M. Eatery” in Hillcrest.
“Exceptionally happy people work for Snooze,” says Rob Butterfield (no relation to Mrs. Butterworth), who’s been around the San Diego restaurant biz for 25-plus years (Gustaf Anders, Cafe Japengo, man-aging partner of Parallel 33) and now unlocks the door at 3940 Fifth Avenue around 5 every morning. “How often have you seen a chef dancing when he’s cooking for 150 people?”
Not often, and you can’t see into the kitchen at Snooze anyway, not even when San Diego skies spill sun like radiant Java through peaked skylights that float 40 feet overhead. Housed in a new building on what was the original Corvette Diner’s parking lot, Snooze is the first out-of-town venture for a small, upscale Denver chain that nails comfort food. Such top-quality raw materials as Niman Ranch cage-free eggs (lightly poached, so you can get egg on your face) pair like courtesans with a sturdy hash of artisan-cured corned beef. Pancakes can be merely dandy, like the plain buttermilk and gluten-free discs, or dandified, like pineapple upside-down cakes with caramelized pineapple, cinnamon butter and vanilla-flavored crème anglaise (what, pray tell, is the calorie count on this one?). The bar seems an unlikely adjunct to a dining room that locks the doors at 2:30 p.m., but Butterfield spills that workers rising from graveyard shifts at Hillcrest hospitals float in for adult beverages like the A.M. Manhattan, a tasty variant on Irish coffee. In the P.M, Snooze aspires to host private events…
ANOTHER DENVER INSTITUTION, D-bar (“Dessert bar,” get it?) soon will snuggle up against Snooze. Sweet news for Fifth Avenue? Maybe, but the stretch from here to Karen Krasne’s Extraordinary Desserts near Palm Street already includes Chocolat and BabyCakes and is getting mighty sugary. D-bar proprietor and pastry pro Keegan Gerhard, a 15-year Food Network veteran, confects a repertoire of desserts named “d=mc2” (it’s sophisticated AND incorporates Rice Crispies), and one called “where my PEACHES at — Machu Peachu?” that presumably is easier to eat than describe…
IT’S COMFORTING TO KNOW that tidiness counts with the kitchen staff at Union Kitchen & Tap, an aggressive new “American Fare” restaurant on South Coast Highway in Encinitas. The menu suggests that $7 will buy “4 Large Dusted Shrimp” to augment beefy entrées like a blackened, 16-ounce rib-eye. Who doesn’t like dusty crustaceans? Odd, though, that a place that serves Old South grub like shrimp ‘n’ grits and fish with hoppin’ John, cornbread puree and wilted greens, should be called Union — a name that didn’t play well in Old Dixie…
HEY, LET’S OPEN A RESTAURANT — we’ll all get rich (disclaimer: don’t cash in the trust fund, since losing your shirt is likely). Some restaurateurs do prosper, like the proprietors of Wang’s in the Desert, the Palm Springs chinoiseriste that recently opened a branch right here in North Park. It occupies the ground floor and mezzanine of a behemoth, abandoned department store that once was the proud local flagship of JCPenney, more or less the equivalent of Galleries Lafayette if you delete the Chanel, Dior and Givenchy departments. The vast space seems to shrink when the crowds arrive, as they do on cue Tuesday through Sunday. After dark, the bold, blood-red sign slashes through onyx skies over University Avenue like a knife, with Wang’s sketched boldly in the pseudo-Chinese script used by restaurants for decades. Something of a “Top 40” list of Chinese-American faves, like sweet-and-sour soup and kung pao-you-name-it, the menu features several house creations, too, such as jalapeño calamari and edamame hummus. Definitely not your old-line chop suey shack…
THE GASLAMP QUARTER NEVER STOPS humming, but the price point has angled downwards lately with the arrival of eateries like IHOP Express (even quicker service than at regular IHOPs, and an amazing creation called “Pancakes in a Cup”), and the replacement of La Strada, the old stand-by at the corner of Fifth and G, with a new version of the Whiskey Girl sports bar. Just a couple of doors north, a pizza-by-the-slice cafe has taken over a space that housed several fine restaurants since the early days of the Gaslamp…
HOTELIER LARRY LAWRENCE LEFT US in the 1990s but remains the model of the old-line hotel autocrat, a breed nearly made extinct by chain hostelries. Hotel del Coronado food and beverage director Steve Schackne, whose Del career commenced around the time he started shaving, recalls trying to convince Lawrence to inaugurate happy hours in the hotel’s chic bars. “Sell ’em two drinks and they’ll be happy,” growled Lawrence. And that, of course, was that…
