La Note - Great Breakfasts in Berkeley
Written: Jun 20 '03 (Updated Apr 12 '06)
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Pros: Delicious breakfasts, gorgeous back patio
Cons: Those tiny little tabletops, long weekend waits
The Bottom Line: Easily one of the best picks for breakfast in Berkeley.
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| lyagushka's Full Review: La Note |
La Note sits on the southern edge of the downtown Berkeley area, on Shattuck Avenue, the main corridor for this neighborhood. Despite its slightly off-the-beaten-track location, this Provençal-themed cafe draws crowds of regulars for weekend breakfasts, and for good reason. The food is great, the ambiance light and friendly and the prices reasonable. Parking usually presents comparatively few challenges in this area, but it's also within easy walking distance of the downtown Berkeley BART station. Although La Note serves lunch daily and dinner three nights a week, I have only ever visited it for its impressive breakfasts.
Ambiance/Décor
La Note boasts a lovely, single room dining area and a half-wild but gorgeous outdoor patio. The interior is painted and stencilled with soft greens and rich yellows and softly lit with handcrafted, cloth-covered, modern chandeliers. Large windows that face the sidewalk bring plenty of natural light into the room. The tables inside are tiny, green and very French, as are the green folding chairs that look like they were swiped from a Parisian street cafe. Belle epoque posters and Provençal pottery (which you can buy here) finish off the decorating scheme.
Behind the cafe, there are a few larger tables squeezed in among the lavender, bougainvillea, rose bushes and fruit trees that seemingly await their chance to reclaim the space for themselves. The effect is quite pleasant though. There are large canvas parasols and tall standing gas heaters to make customers more comfortable in the capricious east bay weather.
The patio is more quiet than the interior dining room, but even inside the noise level rarely gets out of hand. In both the patio and the indoor dining room the spacing of tables is reasonable, though it's definitely more generous out back. But the indoor tables never seem large enough to hold the plates once the food arrives.
The two unisex bathrooms are clean and attractively decorated, but they are also raised up a few steps from the dining room, which is quite unusual for Berkeley, with its strict accessibility zoning codes.
The Menu and the Food
In keeping with the design of the restaurant, the bilingual menu features French fare with a southern flair. The breakfast menu includes such things as French toast made with either a hearty French bread or cinnamon brioche, eggs scrambled with goat cheese, chives and roasted tomatoes, an orange marmelade omelette or ratatouille omelette, as well as oatmeal, cream of semolina, muesli and fruit plates. But the pancakes are probably their most popular items.
On my most recent visit, my husband and I ordered our two favorite breakfast dishes: a short stack of oatmeal raspberry pancakes, and the omelette de pomme de terre, with a side of spicy merguez sausages and some tea. The pancakes, as usual, were superb: fluffy, thick and moist without being the least undercooked. They very nearly covered the entire plate and arrived with an artistic swirl of raspberry pureé on the top pancake and the entire stack dusted generously with powdered sugar. A pat of butter and some syrup in a glass bottle completed the dish.
The pomme de terre omelette was good, but not the very best I've ever had at La Note. I especially love the roasted plum tomatoes and caramelized onions that accompany this dish. The omelettes come with a side of toast, but I opted to skip it since this omelette came with plenty of starch in the form of sliced and cooked potatoes right in the open-faced omelette.
The tea arrived in a tall ceramic teapot with little green pitcher of milk. We had a plethora of choices in sweeteners. There were the usual sugar cubes as well as turbinado sugar cubes and two kinds of artificial sweetener in packets. La Note also serves up cafe au lait and cappuccino in those oh-so-French ceramic bowls topped with lots of frothy milk. My coffee imbibing friends tell me they experience transports when drinking La Note's cafe au lait.
La Note serves breakfast every day of the week; on weekdays until 2:30pm and weekends until 3pm. Although I've never eaten here for lunch, they do have an appealing lunch menu, which is available from 11am until 2:30pm. The lunch menu features the sort of salads you typically find in a Paris bistro along with vegetarian and meat charcuterie plates, sandwiches and a few hot dishes. Dinner is served from 6-10pm on Thursday, Friday and Saturday only. Again, I've only ever eaten here for breakfast, but the dinner menu recycles the salads and charcuterie plates from lunch and adds some hot pasta, meat and fish dishes.
Prices
When eating breakfast at La Note with a friend or my husband, the tab usually comes out around $20 to $25, including a 15% tip. Prices seem to be creeping up slowly at La Note, but considering the quality and reliability of the food, the charge still feels reasonable for the East Bay. Dinner entreés price out between $14.50 and $18.95, so that would obviously be a more expensive outing.
Service
The waitresses at La Note are uniformly young and cute, though their skills and attitude allow for a little more variation. Some are attentive and prompt enough, even when the restaurant is full and busy, others seem to have better things to do even when the place is nearly empty. I've never had truly bad service here, but neither has it ever knocked my socks off. There's also been a steady turnover in the waitstaff. What that implies about management I can't say, but I suppose it means one never quite knows what to expect in terms of service here.
Final Thoughts
This is definitely one of my favorite breakfasts spots in Berkeley. I recommend going on a weekday morning, when there will be few customers and you'll have the place to yourself. When the weather is nice, take a seat on back patio if space is still available. If you opt to eat here on a Saturday or Sunday morning, you'd do well to arrive either early or not terribly hungry as lines will lengthen significantly after 9:30 am.
Details, details…..
Address: 2377 Shattuck Avenue
Cross Street: Channing Way
Phone: (510) 843-1535
Hours: Monday – Friday 8am - 2:30pm; Saturday & Sunday 8am - 3pm and for dinner Friday & Saturday 6pm - 10pm
Corkage: $7.50 per bottle at lunch or $10.00 per bottle at dinner
Reservations: accepted for parties of 5 or more during the week or 4 or more for dinner (but not needed for weekday breakfast or lunch)
Smoking is not permitted in any restaurant in California.
credit cards: all major credit cards accepted
Dress: casual
Website: http://lanote.citysearch.com/
I can also recommend a meal at any of these restaurants:
East Bay
• Á Coté - lively pan-Mediterranean tapas in a sleek but fun atmosphere
• Cafe Rouge - best choice for steak or high quality meats in the East Bay
• Cha-ya - vegetarian Japanese restaurant in the Gourmet Ghetto
• Chez Panisse Café - Alice Waters' sumptuous fare at about half the price
• Lalime's - superb New American fare in an intimate setting
• Manpuku - a cheap and simple ramen bar in the Elmwood
• Nan Yang - fantastic Burmese in north Rockridge
• Oliveto - exquisite Italian in Rockridge
• Pho 84 - paradigm-shifting (really!) Vietnamese in downtown Oakland
• Rick & Ann's - another excellent choice for breakfast
• Shen Hua - great Chinese in Berkeley's Elmwood neighborhood
San Francisco
• Boulevard - hands down, the best restaurant in San Francisco
• Woodward's Garden, which is almost as good as Boulevard
• Betelnut - highly recommended for a fun night with a group
• Helmand - little known but excellent Afghan place and a great value
• Suppenkuche - unpretentious German bierhaus charm in Hayes Valley
On the other hand, I can't recommend Cafe Cacao, which is part of the Scharffen Berger chocolate empire, nor Pizzaiolo which features pretentious, outrageously priced pizza served by hipper-than-thou servers.
Recommended:
Yes
Vegetarian Friendly: Yes
Notes, Tips or Menu Recommendations Go for the short stack of Oatmeal Raspberry Pancakes. You won't regret it.
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