Breakfast with the snoots — the Pacific Whey Cafe and Baking Company knows its audience and knows its locale. That’s the well-off and then some crew that lurks not merely in Newport Beach in my neck of the woods, but Corona del Mar and the environs. The coast is right there, the hills hide the rest of the county and by implication the rest of humanity, and I strongly suspect everyone there thinks Bush is an ‘all right guy’ and deplores all those filthy awful taxes. (Then again Laguna Beach is down the road a bit, so maybe there’s more going on than I’m aware of.)
Had never heard of this restaurant before today but a random search among breakfast locations on-line turned it up and made it seem worthy of investigation if allgedly a bit expensive — but then again, I saw where it was and I figured it would know its clientele well, and so it proved. Of the two locations open, I chose the one at ‘Crystal Cove Promenade,’ aka, ‘look Muffy, a mall just for us’ — all the little stores you would need in one place so you wouldn’t have to go anywhere else. (Trader Joe’s? Of course, etc.) So off a friend and I went to it. The sun was starting to emerge, and the beautiful people were out. Some would mock them for their airs, others would envy them their lives, and so forth. Call me lucky enough to have hung around enough variants of this kind of crew to be neither envious nor scornful (well, too much) — they were there and all quite obviously themselves. The teens were beautiful/sullen, the folks in their forties relying on various plastic surgery efforts, the older types being comfortably crusty, and all mostly really really white but thankfully not exclusively so.
And so in the incipient heat of the day, but still cooled by the ocean just enough, thankfully, I merrily devoured a cream cheese danish, fresh orange juice, an omelette with avocado and bacon, potatoes, fresh fruit — really, the kind of mix and presentation that chains like the Corner Bakery make their stock in trade, and this place is definitely setting its sights on becoming some sort of minichain. And it was all pretty good and I suppose, yeah, a little step up from said chains, a pleasant and filling mix and the place itself had the same sorta semi-ramshackle/country/shabby chic charm suitable to its aims, however prefab.
Go again? Well, maybe, I don’t see the immediate need. But it was plenty good for a morning and everyone there obviously is very, very well comfortable with it. It is exactly what they want and need.