First, I love breakfast. Every Saturday and Sunday morning, I bide my time with a pot of coffee, the Times, and some HGTV, waiting for the partner in crime to wake up so we can go somewhere to eat. Our usual haunts are Allgood Cafe, Bolsa, Hattie’s (on Sundays), and the Mecca. Second, I love Casa Linda. Great area. Love the Spanish-style shopping center. But I hate that there aren’t more dining options. That’s why I was happy to see Florida-based mini-chain-in-the-making Another Broken Egg Cafe open. Breakfast and Casa Linda: Two great tastes that taste great together. The verdict for Another Egg? Dependable. Lets start with coffee, the benchmark by which all breakfast joints should be measured. Broken Egg brews Communtiy Coffee (the cafe started out in Louisiana) and they brew it nice and strong. Not so the Bloody Mary. It was a tad weak, lacking bite. Lots of celery salt and picked okra though. That’s a plus. For breakfast, we stuck with egg based dishes: the aforementioned biscuits and gravy with eggs and Crab Cakes Cavallo. The latter is a satisfying crab cakes benedict-style dish with a nice light hollandaise sauce with andouille sausage and scallion. Dry country potatoes were not as “great” as the menu touted. The biscuits and gravy came with choice of meat (patty not link, thank God), potatoes, and two eggs. The gravy was flavorful but thin and the biscuits a bit dense. An order of cheese grits with a dash of Broken Egg’s homemade pepper sauce perked up our hit-and-miss meal. (You can buy the pepper sauce as well as the coffee mugs, assorted t-shirts, and bud vases at the cafe. How very Hard Rock.) All in all, a serviceable breakfast joint with moments of greatness. I’ll return to try the blackberry grits and monster cinnamon roll (both considered “specialty items”) and support Casa Linda’s latest culinary endeavor. That, and I love breakfast.
