Creek Running North

One of the things of which I’ve felt the lack in Pinole is a good breakfast place. There are a couple standard American places in long walk/short drive range, one of them a national chain. There’s The Alley, a tiny little breakfast joint right downtown that seemed promising in “hole in the wall” style when we first moved here, and if you go on a weekday it’s not a horrible experience. But the short order cook they have on weekends can only make one meal at a time, for some reason. If you order toast and the person in line ahead of you orders poached eggs, the toaster will sit there cold until those eggs are poached. My mom’s partner Jim and I sat there for an hour and a half one Saturday morning waiting for scrambled eggs: I’m not going back.

And there’s the Bear Claw Bakery, a nice enough place with a bit of a following. As a bakery, it’s a good choice. As a place for breakfast, meh. For one thing, though they start with good beans, they make a surprisingly bad cup of coffee. Or at least they have each time I’ve given them the chance to change my mind, which has been several times in the last five years.

We’re regulars at Pinole Creek Cafe, sort of — we used to go there every Thursday or Friday until Zeke got sick, and Raymond the owner absolutely loves Becky. He’s threatened every once in a while to open for breakfast on weekdays, and we’d go. Jinny, the other owner and cook (Raymond being her spouse) is, quite seriously, one of the most creative cooks I’ve ever found. Breakfast there would be pretty damn good, I think. But they’re just two people, and even the most committed workaholics need to sleep sometimes.

So Pinole is without an acceptable breakfast place, and I’ll admit I was kind of excited when we walked past the vacant corner storefront at San Pablo and Tennent, the precise center of Old Town and three blocks from our house, to see a sign saying that the space will soon be filled by First Street Cafe. Their breakfast menu from their original location (across the Carquinez Strait in Benicia) looks good. Even if they mess up the food, though, they may fill another notable Pinole void: the lack of non-Starbucks places to buy an espresso or five and read a book. (Wi-Fi optional.)

I imagine there’ll be some grumbling about the tenant. It’s an upscalish-styled place, to be sure. The old guard in Pinole is already peeved at apparent machinations between the city council and the town’s most prominent yuppie restaurateur whose Pear Street Bistro sells good martinis and overrated food, cooked competently and uninspiringly, presented in self-consciously hip “stack everything into a big pile” fashion. The big chain supermarket that held down the plaza up on Pinole Valley Road, a 15-minute walk from Old Town, abandoned the city for the freeway strip malls a year ago, and Trader Joes is moving in, which further annoys the old guard despite the fact that no chain supermarket will touch the space. I can picture complaints that the cafe will further “Berkelify” Pinole. But the “semirural small redneck town” image that’s the alternative plays a little false these days. Pinole has the potential to become a walkable, livable community, attractive to people who would just as soon leave their cars parked when they go shopping. Part of the process is having businesses open up that people will actually walk to.

Even when I was dirt-poor in Berkeley 25 years ago, I loved taking a few of my hard-earned dollars on a day off (earned serving breakfast to other people the other six days a week) and walking to a cafe to buy a couple fried eggs and 500 milligrams of caffeine. It’ll be nice to be able to do that again. Assuming First Street’s coffee doesn’t suck. Maybe I need to make a field trip to Benicia to visit the mother ship.

Oh, and if they have live bluegrass at their Pinole location like they do in Benicia, that’d be nice.