Cafe Flora Now Serving Weekday Breakfast

by RVO on January 22, 2010

Ah, breakfast. It sits right at the heart of mealtime ironies: widely considered essential for a healthy day and almost universally skipped by everyone beyond the age of ten.

The gap between importance and neglect is probably due to a traditionally narrow range of breakfast options. Let’s face it, not much has changed in the morning meal in the centuries since someone discovered that an egg can be scrambled, fried, boiled and beaten, and bacon and sausage come from our friend the pig.

So it came as a pleasant surprise when our friends at vegetarian-oriented Café Flora invited us in to try out their new breakfast menu, now being served every day during the week, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., with their always popular brunch still going strong during the weekend.


The restaurant has been serving weekday breakfast since the beginning of the new year, and MvB and I, who sampled the Flora breakfast menu this morning, were told that business is steadily growing.

The coffee, from Stumptown, was the perfect eye opener. Michael remarked that it was hard to tell it was drip. The compact breakfast menu features seven items, four egg scrambles, a breakfast quesadilla, biscuits and gravy, and an old-world-style porridge served with dried fruit and almonds. The menu also includes a fruit parfait, a cinnamon roll, and a fresh pastry.


We settled on the Fall Forager ($9), an egg scramble with fresh, locally foraged wild mushrooms, crimini mushrooms, squash, fresh sage and topped with Fontina cheese; and the Bluebird Grain Farm’s Old World Cereal ($6), the hot porridge with the fruit and nuts.

The Forager was a revelation that proved you don’t have to reinvent the meal at breakfast. Just select some fresh ingredients, cook with care and stay out of the way. The mushrooms were delicious and mixed perfectly with the butternut squash, but it was the Fontina that made this dish really stand out. Probably the best bit of scrambled eggs I’ve had in quite a while.

The Fall Forager comes with home fries, nice and crispy and grits. The grits, mixed with smoked mozzarella cheese, deserve special mention. I’ve toured the south and had grits from Shreveport to Savannah, but these were the best grits I’ve ever had.

The porridge did what any good hot cereal should do: it warmed you up and filled you up. Thick, you could stand a spoon up in it, and remarkably smooth, it came with fresh milk and brown sugar (what else?). It was good, no doubt, but I found the almonds, served on top with the dried fruit, a bit distracting. I’m not one who likes to crunch my breakfast cereal.

Prices range from the $5 to $6 range for the pastries, rolls and hot cereals to the $9 to $10 range for the scrambles and other entrees. The service and atmosphere, always great at Café Flora, were superb, thanks to our server, Jack (whom some of you may remember fondly from his Victrola days).

All in all, it’s a win. The Madison Valley is weak for breakfast options beyond a latte and a muffin. Flora is filling that void. It’s a bonus that they are doing it with their usual devotion to fresh food and rich flavor combinations.

Filed under Restaurant