Brunch at Zazie

Finally decided to try to wait in line for Zazie (941 Cole St), the French restaurant that everyone likes to go to for brunch. Got there at 11:30...got seated maybe 40 minutes later? And got the food right around an hour after I got there... Quite the wait, though a former coworker I ran into who goes frequently said it was the worst he's ever seen it this morning. Just my luck!

The lovely thing (or maybe the bad thing, depending how you look at it) about Zazie is that for all their pancake/French toast dishes, you can choose to get one, two, or three pieces, and it's priced accordingly. Similarly, for their poached egg (and possibly other egg) dishes, you can choose one, two, or three eggs, with a gradated price tag for that as well. This is great for me because I'm indecisive as all hell, I was starving (having not eaten anything yet that morning, and having worked out that morning), and everything looked great. Between my friend and I, we ended up ordering one slice of the gingerbread pancakes with lemon curd and bijou pear and one slice of the French Toast Tahiti (Challah French bread stuffed with caramelized bananas and walnuts) to share (we each took half), and then I ordered myself a one egg St Trop (poached egg on English muffin with smoked salmon, red onion, capers, and lemon hollandaise sauce with a side of home fries with whole garlic cloves baked alongside) while she ordered a one egg Monaco (similar to mine but with prosciutto and tomatoes provencale). Yumminess. The main problem was deciding in what order to eat - I saved the sweets for last and they ended up cooling down a bit and therefore not being quite as yummy as if they'd been fresh out of the kitchen. The St Trop wasn't quite what I had in mind - there's a smoked salmon eggs benedict-type sandwich I had at a restaurant in SF years ago that I loved, and this wasn't it - but it was decent. A few too many capers. The home fries with the garlic baked alongside were quite good. The French Toast Tahiti was yummy though I should have drizzled more maple syrup on it (it came with a sort of caramelized sauce but I didn't get the plate with the sauce). The gingerbread pancakes were rather thick and the texture was rougher than I'm used to for pancakes, but they were interesting,and the lemon curd and pear were really good.

I don't know if I want to wait 45 minutes for brunch again, but Zazie was yummy. Maybe I'll go again sometime when the line is shorter. It seems Bambino's two doors down serves brunch and the reviews on Yelp are pretty good for it, and that place never has a wait. So maybe I'll check out Zazie and go to Bambino's if it's got too long a wait next time.