Trying to Stay Seine

When I was 22 and living in Paris, I often spent my mornings at a rowdy little cafe, Chez George, near my apartment in the Latin Quarter just down the street from the Luxembourg Gardens. Chez George late at night was a favorite haunt of buskers and musicians, a cacophony of earnest voices speaking rapidly in a dozen languages mixed with guitar music and singing, where the air was thick with the blue haze of Gitanes. It was overwhelming to me, and I seldom went there. At least not in the evening.

Instead, I went midmornings, when the proprietor, a large, beefy man who was bald and always rolled his stained shirt sleeves up above his elbows, would methodically sweep the well-worn wooden floors, scowling, while doing his best to ignore his customers. I would stand at the zinc bar with a few other students and the working stiffs and order a cafe au lait, which would come with a tartine, a small chunk of buttered baguette that I would dunk in my coffee, like everyone else at the bar, and this would be my breakfast.

I think of Chez George and the winter I spent in Paris whenever I have breakfast at Britta’s on Main Street in Balboa. Not because it is rowdy at night--it is not--or a place buskers call home (are there any buskers in Orange County?), but because it is one thing in the evening when it is frequented mainly by tourists wandering around the Fun Zone and the Pavilion who find Britta’s just by accident, and it is something else in the morning, when almost all the customers either work or live in the neighborhood.

If Britta’s were more like a French cafe, there would be tables spilling out onto the sidewalk and you’d be able to enjoy your coffee beneath the shade of the recently manicured ficus trees. And you would pass the morning being totally ignored by desultory waiters.

If it were more like France, you could read the paper in the sunshine and take note of the old guys smoking cigarettes and drinking gray coffee out of tall Styrofoam cups in front of the Balboa Pavilion, either getting ready to go out on a fishing boat or having just come back, and you could watch the young couple sitting on a bench in front of the post office across the street kiss as if they were about to part and never see each other again. To paraphrase Joni Mitchell, in Balboa they kiss on Main Street, amour, mama, not cheap display.

But Balboa is not France, so there are no tables on the sidewalk, and the best you can do is sit near the front of the cafe where you can look out from your wrought-iron table with its checkered tablecloth through the French doors to the sidewalk tableau outside.

The trade-off is that the service is much better than in Paris--Cassie or one of the other waitresses in a long, white apron cheerfully fills your coffee cup no matter how long you linger. And though there are no tartines for dunking, the food is superior to anything I ever ate at Chez George.

There are omelets and frittatas and Raqi’s granola pancakes, named after Britta’s daughter, Raquel, and a number of stylized eggs Benedict dishes, like Britta’s Beny, which is made with avocado and tomato instead of Canadian bacon, or the Brittaccia Benedict served on focaccia and topped with tomato-herb sauce and Parmesan cheese.

Sometimes I allow myself the small pleasure of sitting in Britta’s all morning. I do not consider that a waste of time. I consider it cheaper than therapy.

This morning I have been here so long I have actually read every section of the paper and twice had to run out, upon seeing the meter maid, to put another quarter in the parking meter. Cassie keeps coming by with the coffee, and I keep drinking it.

Bing Crosby--or some World War II-era singer who sounds very much like Der Bingle--croons some silly Big Band-era song: “I like potato chips, moonlight and motor trips, how about you?”

The table next to me empties twice. First it’s occupied by four 20-something males who continually interrupt their shoveling of broken eggs and breakfast potatoes to comment on the young women walking by (“That’s the third time those girls have walked by. I think they’re trolling”), and then by two elderly women who have stopped in for Tazo tea.

By the time I am finally ready to leave, it is almost noon and the lunch crowd is beginning to filter in.

Still, Britta, who is wiping the wine glasses behind the little counter in the middle of the room, seems surprised to see me gathering up my things. “Have to work?” she says.

Yes, I tell her.

“Too bad,” she says, staring out of her cafe at the passing scene. “It’s such a perfect day for doing nothing.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Open 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily; breakfast served until 1:30 p.m.

David Lansing’s column is published Fridays in Orange County Calendar. His e-mail address is occalendar@latimes.com.