Eating Well at Café Vida

Families with young children in strollers, couples hanging out with friends, school kids grabbing a bite to eat before or after soccer games gravitate to the Village’s restaurants.

One of the most popular, Café Vida serves up comfort food all day long.

In the morning there are omelettes, scrambles, wraps, oatmeal, eggs over easy or sunny side up with potatoes and toast, sausages, bacon, pancakes (multigrain, buttermilk and blueberry-corn meal), granola, and fresh fruit plates.  Café Vida uses organic eggs, taking pride in their bright yellow, sweet yolks.

With high quality ingredients as the starting point, the fast order chefs put care into the preparation and presentation of each dish, emphasizing healthy eating as well as generous portions.

Serving breakfast, lunch and dinner, customers at Café Vida can have just about any of the dishes on the menu at any time of the day. A burger for breakfast, no problem. What about eggs for dinner? If that’s what you like, why not?

During the breakfast and lunch rush on the weekends, the crowds line up, so it isn’t easy to hang out. Stop in during the week in the off hours and a bottomless cup of coffee will carry you through a long conversation or keep you company while you read the novel you can’t put down.

Café Vida is part of our family routine. My wife meets a girlfriend at Café Vida at noon and I meet with my friend there as well. Clay and I come at 10:30am when the wait time is under 10 minutes. That gives us time to start our weekly catch-up conversation. By the time we sit down, we’re deep in a story about our wives, our sons or our work and we forget to look at the menu.

Which doesn’t really matter, because when Carlos Larion, our waiter, comes over, instead of asking what we want, he says, “The usual?”  All it takes is a nod and he’s off to place the order for what we have every time we visit Café Vida:  two decaf coffees and a split order, medium-rare cheeseburger, with cheddar, everything on it and Caesar salad and sweet potato fries on the side.

A split order? That’s right. The portions are that big and not only the hamburgers. When my wife has breakfast with Lesli (Clay’s wife), she orders a breakfast quesadilla (no bacon). She eats half and brings the rest home for an afternoon snack.

In addition to the well-prepared, healthy food, the waitstaff is always friendly, even during the busiest times. That’s as much a plus as the food. It’s always great to enjoy where you eat as much as what you eat. Café Vida manages both very nicely.

Follow David's Palisades Food Adventures every Thursday. David Latt's blog, Men Who Like to Cook, can be found here.