Anne suggested we try Le Pichet or Lola for breakfast, and Lola’s online sample menu included a ‘sweet pea omelette’. This tipped the scales in favor of Tom Douglas’ 4th Avenue restaurant.
I’ve been looking for an excuse to swing into Lola since last fall when I worked for five days alongside Cammie and Josie on an organic goat farm. They both worked on Douglas’ staff at Lola, and spoke highly of the food. Yesterday presented that opportunity in the hopes of a sweet pea omelette.
Unfortunately the sweet pea omelette was on hiatus in favor of a Dungeness crab version. The only sweet peas on the menu appeared as part of Tom’s Big Breakfast that promised “pacific octopus, sweet peas, pork belly, and a sunny egg” for 16 clams.
Now my history with octopus-started years ago in Chinatown in college-has mainly consisted of chewing the tasteless equivalent of Michelin tires. Yet if Douglas was willing to feature this member of the mollusk family so prominently on his menu, I decided to risk another run-in with rubber.
It was a risk worth taking. Douglas’ octopus was stunning and anything but road-worthy. Add in a light cream sauce with fresh herbs that puddled on the plate, the pork belly, sweet peas, and slivers of sauteed onion under an egg, and the result was both wonderful, unexpected, and a far cry from your typical big breakfast. After several tentative bites, you forget the dish’s exotic ocean and farm origins in favor of simply enjoying the flavors.
Afterwards you can slip across the street and pick up a loaf of fresh bread from the Dahlia Bakery (another Douglas business) for lunch or dinner. And if you don’t have a hard and fast rule of ‘no dessert after breakfast’ you might try one of the bakery’s cherry almond scones or a coconut cream pie bite.
