The restaurant that brags about the serving the best breakfast in town is setting its sights on lunch.
Over the past two years, Dave Russel and his wife Susan have been running the locals’ favorite breakfast eatery, The Menu, in Crown Point of Pacific Beach. It’s been expanding since they took over.
The previous owner kept the restaurant relatively unchanged over the years, and Russel said he just wanted to add to the local flavor. He kept all the breakfast favorites like the homestyle bacon, eggs, pancakes and potato breakfasts. Mexican-inspired dishes like the machaca omelet, which is basically a spicy omelet filled with shredded beef, are always popular at the traditionally breakfast restaurant, sitting almost hidden at 3784 Ingraham St.
“There’s just not too many places like this,” he said. “[There’s] not too many places that don’t feel like Denny’s.”
While The Menu can still lay claim to “the best breakfast in town,” the added lunch fare includes gourmet salads and sandwiches. Dave and Susan are also taking advantage of the business’ unused liquor license, adding popular eye-openers such as bloody Marys and sunrise screwdrivers to the menu. Adult lunch patrons might prefer a special Menu lemonade or sangria to go with their meal.
While the Menu’s lunch menu is relatively new, the restaurant itself has served breakfast since the ’80s, but its history goes back to the ’70s, when it originally opened as a steakhouse, Dave said.
True to the mom-and-pop tradition of the few remaining non-franchise restaurants around, the Menu emerges in its own right as a small slice of Crown Point history. The décor pays homage to the most recognizable Pacific Beach and Mission Beach landmarks as they looked decades ago. On the walls hang blown-up black-and-white historical prints and early real estate ads.
It’s a setting owed to the faithfulness of the Menu’s regular customers ” people like Ralph Wilkowski and Mike Godly, sitting at the U-shaped “regulars table” one morning. Above the regulars table hangs a long-board surfboard that allegedly belonged to Malibu surf legend Miki Dora.
Wilkowski, a local sign maker, has been eating at the Menu for about two years and said he was skeptical when a friend invited him to the Menu for breakfast.
“It used to be fairly rundown, but since Dave took over they’ve been pretty good at keeping up the general atmosphere.” Wilkowski said.
And Godly, a friend of Dave’s since the ’80s, said the waitresses are top notch.
“Everybody’s really cool,” he said, adding that the Menu is a friendly place “a place, he said, locals can tell their overnight visitors, “OK, you can sleep here, but you gotta take me to the Menu tomorrow morning.”