Clementine

The awning in front of Clementine reads "Bakery Take-Out Catering" and on a sunny day, a row of French garden tables set out along the sidewalk basks in its tangerine glow. The tables are dressed in pretty blue-and-gold plaid oilcloths and set with old-fashioned salt and pepper shakers. In front, a blackboard easel straddles the sidewalk to tout the day's special written in colored chalks: half a smoked turkey sandwich, a cup of Hungarian mushroom soup and the cookie of your choice.

Inside, a counter is piled high with freshly baked pastries and a deli case displays pristine salads in oval dishes. A clutch of customers line up to place their order, then grab a seat at one of the dozen or so wooden tables. Couples lean into each other, talking or sharing the newspaper.

Strictly speaking, Clementine isn't a restaurant. It's more of a casual cafe and bakery. The silverware is utilitarian. The menu is a simple Xeroxed sheet. There's no wine list and no waiters and it closes up tight at 7 p.m. most nights. But if you're looking for a casual breakfast or lunch, Clementine is a gem.

Just about everything I've had at this Century City cafe (and I think I've eaten just about every item on the menu) is outright delicious. And I don't say that lightly. Owner Annie Miler didn't just drop out of the sky. A former sous chef at Campanile, she also worked with Nancy Silverton baking pastries, so she's a double threat: someone who can both cook and bake. The cafe's menu reflects her fondness for American comfort food with things like hot chocolate, blueberry sour cream coffeecake, egg salad sandwich, meatloaf and thumbprint cookies.

That faded color photo of a little kid in pigtails proudly holding up an obviously homemade cake with the word "Hi" scribbled on the pale green frosting is the young baker herself, age 8. I think her secret must be that she taps into those happy memories whenever she's whipping butter and sugar together or pouring a ribbon of vanilla-scented batter into a pan. You can see Miler in the back, not looking all that much different in her white chef's jacket, a pen clipped to her lapel, her blond hair hidden under a printed kerchief.


Breakfast delights

Mornings, the kitchen bakes up fat, buttery scones properly crumbly and glazed with sugar. My favorite, the strawberry ones, are cut out with a flower-shaped cookie cutter. Like all of Miler's pastries, these are emphatically not too sweet, which means you can taste the butter, sugar, vanilla and other good ingredients that go into making them from scratch. The individual blueberry sour cream coffeecakes look like wide-body muffins. Bite into one, the moist crumb tastes of tangy sour cream and the dough is stained a deep blue violet with blueberries.

Sometimes she'll have sunny corn muffins with thin slices of orange woven into the batter, or miniature loaves of old-fashioned banana bread. I'm just as crazy for her apple turnovers as the famous apple galettes at Pôilane in Paris. Hers are really a hand pie, a flaky half crescent loaded with tender apples freckled with cinnamon.

Clementine, I'm convinced, has the best breakfast in L.A. The coffee is a rich Graffeo brew. The orange juice is fresh squeezed, a real jolt of vitamin C, chilled and intense. And all of the morning pastries are absolutely fresh, something increasingly hard to find these days.

In addition to those pastries, you can order fluffy buttermilk biscuits, warm, with butter and locally made Edon "spoonable" preserves, which come in flavors like blueberry, raspberry or rose geranium. Or that same biscuit turned into a "breakfast sandwich" enclosing a perfectly poached egg and gorgeous pink shaved country ham, which tastes as sweet as prosciutto dolce. Satiny house-cured gravlax comes with a bagel and cream cheese. And on Saturdays only, she makes eggs benedict with same country ham and a lilting citrus-scented hollandaise.

There's homemade granola, too, laced with dried apricots and cherries and warming bowls of old-fashioned steel-cut oatmeal. The clincher, though, on a chilly morning, is a steaming cup of hot chocolate with a homemade marshmallow melting into it.

I have friends who will switch their whole day around in order to come to lunch with me at Clementine. The draw is that half a sandwich with a cup of soup, especially if the soup on offer is old-fashioned tomato soup. This tastes the way you always hoped Campbell's would -- deep and tomatoey, barely smoothed with cream, entirely comforting. Manhattan clam chowder makes a respectable showing, too, loaded with clams and diced potatoes in a stock that combines clam juice, chicken stock and tomatoes.

The art of the sandwich is alive and well at Clementine. Every day Miler demonstrates how wonderful a simple sandwich can be. She's really thought about which bread is right for which filling. Her tall egg salad sandwich, for example, has the perfect balance of hard-boiled egg to mayonnaise on country white bread. A garnish of crisp emerald watercress with slivers of cornichon makes this classic sandwich sing. Right now there's an autumn chicken salad -- very chunky, very moist, tossed with flame grapes and diced apples and celery root -- on pecan raisin bread that goes remarkably well with the chicken salad. Rare roast beef is just that, punched up with a fine horseradish mustard on a rustic bread. Liverwurst with crispy bacon, though, may be too much of a good thing. And tuna melt, well you have to be a devotee to enjoy the rich messy concoction of cheese melted over tuna on organic wheat bread.

Salads include an excellent Cobb or Greek salad strewn with crumbled feta. You can also order a combo of any three salads from the deli case. I suggest the delicious beet and orange salad, the mixed grain salad made with wild rice, couscous and flax plus cubes of roasted butternut squash, leeks and dried cranberries.

Call ahead and you can take Clementine home for dinner. A blackboard lists a handful of takeout items each night, which don't seem to change very much. The star is a fluffy meatloaf with a bright red ketchup glaze. There's almost always a roasted lemon-thyme chicken stuffed with herbs and tasting of lemon and garlic. And a less successful chicken pot pie (small or large) with a buttery golden crust decorated with flower cut-outs. The chicken is shredded rather than in chunks, and though the flavor is full and rich, the gravy was pasty on the night I tried it.

Cookies make the perfect portable dessert, and these are great, especially the thin chewy gingersnaps pungent with the ground root, or the divine peanut butter cookies with a layer of peanut butter inside. Part of what makes them so delicious is that they're not too sweet. Even the chocolate chip isn't cloying.


Deep dark chocolate pudding

Consider though the very serious chocolate pudding. This is fabulous, deep dark, almost black, smooth as satin, and definitely pudding rather than mousse or anything fancier. Miler also bakes a couple of pies on occasion, both with tall, proud crusts made from homemade graham crackers. Banana cream pie is a cloud of softly whipped cream and smooth banana custard. Her Key lime pie made more or less on the same model is terrific.

The motto "homemade seasonal food" stenciled on the back of the staff's T-shirts says it all. This is real food, lovingly prepared. And in this genre, Clementine is doing it better than anybody else. When I was first looking for somewhere to live in L.A., I giggled when I saw ads for apartments listed as "Spago-adjacent." Now I wouldn't mind being Clementine-adjacent.