Sunday morning we walked down from the hotel and got a late breakfast/early lunch at Zinc Café.
Zinc Cafe & Market
350 Ocean Avenue
Laguna Beach, CA 92651
Phone: 949-494-6302
http://www.zinccafe.com/
Zinc Café is a place I have gone to with my ex-wife many times. We’ve always loved it. Honestly, it is the best and only great place for a brunch in Laguna Beach that I know of unless you go to the Ritz Carlton Hotel which isn’t walking distance from Downtown.
I showed Shannon the two parts. One half of it is almost like a deli where you can get prepared food to go which is fabulous. We went over to the lunch section where you order from a menu, pay, then they give you a buzz when your food is ready and you come and pick it up.
We were both starving so we got a veggie burger. It appears they made the patties themselves. It was just spectacular. The one thing I wasn’t thrilled about is they had, it is incredibly natural food, but they had packets of mayonnaise that had preservatives in them. We had a long talk on mayonnaise and with Shannon’s chef training she explained how you can make mayonnaise from scratch without even having the vinegar-y taste. So, for a restaurant of this caliber I would have loved it if they could make fresh mayonnaise or at a minimum use Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s mayonnaise that doesn’t have any preservatives in it. Other than that one complaint, the veggie burger was off the hook.
We also got a salad. The salad had 3 parts. One third of it was a beet salad. We could not figure out what the dressing was on it. When Shannon asked, we found out it was actually made with whole cream with other things mixed into it. In addition to that there was an egg and fennel salad. The fennel salad with, I think, pieces of dill was amazing. If you took a little bite from each of the 3 and put them all in your mouth together it was absolutely fabulous.
