Oh, brunch. Anyone who has spent more than 15 minutes with me on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday knows that brunch is my favorite weekend leisure activity. It would also be my favorite weekday activity were it not for “being enrolled in classes.” Plus, most restaurants annoyingly refuse to serve staple brunch foods Monday through Friday. I’m still reeling from a recent attempt to get bacon and pancakes at Mayfield Café on Martin Luther King, Jr. day, foiled when the waitress informed our table that only the banal “lunch” menu is available on Mondays. To quote one of my disappointed brunching companions (by way of Thomas Paine), “these are the times that try men’s souls.”

 

In my mind, brunch combines all the best possibilities of the restaurant-going experience: long, leisurely hours spent at the table, high calorie foods you would never cook for yourself (Hollandaise sauce) and a tacit social sanction to drink alcohol before noon. Plus, most brunch dishes include bacon. Bacon tastes really good.

 

So given that “brunching” is one of my core competences, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m always on the lookout for a new spot to further refine my brunching talents. This weekend, I was happy to discover Joanie’s Café, an unassuming but popular restaurant on California Avenue. Just a five-minute drive from campus, Joanie’s is a convenient option for lazy Stanford students. Plus, the atmosphere is casual enough that you could literally walk in wearing footsie pajamas (or an especially sloppy iteration of the standard Stanford basketball shorts and frat tank uniform), and I doubt anyone would care. On Sunday mornings, the California Avenue Farmers’ Market takes place right outside Joanie’s. Given that both times I’ve been, the wait was well over half an hour, the farmers’ market provides a much-needed diversion. (As an aside, the only thing a pack of hung-over, straight men turn out to like less than “brunching” is being forced to wait for a brunch table by strolling through a farmers’ market. Learned that lesson the hard way.)

 

But the wait for Joanie’s is totally worth it. The menu is packed with brunch staples— waffles, French toast, a bevy of Eggs Benedict varietals and more omelet combinations than you can shake a stick at. My first time at Joanie’s, I ordered brioche French toast with strawberries. Although having to separately order strawberries (an extra $2), real maple syrup (an extra $1.25), bacon (an extra $3) and brioche rather than regular bread (an extra $1.50) was truly irritating, the combination was totally worth it. Also wonderful was an omelet of smoked salmon, chives and cream cheese, topped with Hollandaise sauce. As an added bonus, the coffee is insanely good, and the waiters come by about every twenty seconds with free refills. The archetypically mediocre Palo Alto restaurant suffers from unnecessarily fanciful embellishments on already good dishes, executed poorly and with weird ingredients. Joanie’s classic, comfort food-laden menu is a breath of fresh air for the near-campus dining scene. All the ingredients are fresh, the cooking is authentic and the atmosphere is far from pretentious. Just add a few good friends, and you’ve got the perfect brunch.