Boozefish Wine Bar: A Saturday brunch

Boozefish Wine Bar owner Maija Diethelm has been serving brunch for the past year (10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturdays only), but I only recently heard about it. And I may not be an isolated case: I brought along my friends Carol Ann and Truman last Saturday, and we were the only occupied table in the dining room.

Yes, it's really coffee

​Now, I've been around long enough to remember when ordering a cup of hot tea in a restaurant meant getting a little "hottle" of hot water, a coffee cup and an unwrapped teabag. Today, ordering tea is a presentation. It involves a big wooden box filled with attractively wrapped teas and permitting the customer to choose his or her beverage.

Last Saturday, I simply wanted an espresso before breakfast. But I'll be damned if the beautiful server -- who happened to be Diethelm -- didn't come over to the table with a black wooden box and opened it to reveal a series of colored pellets. At first I thought they were candy! But no, instead of a traditional espresso machine for coffee drinks like cappuccino or lattes, Diethelm uses Nestle's Nespresso system, "a technically advanced espresso machine using pre-measured ground coffee capsules that protect more than 900 coffee aromas."

I had to read all the descriptions of the various blends to see whether I wanted Arpeggio or Vivalto or God only knows what. But I admit, it was a fine cup of espresso.

The menu is European in spirit: a quiche du jour, a variety of crepes, a veggie wrap, a salad and smoked lox with sweet-and-sour onions, herbed cream cheese and pira chips. The quiche is the closest thing to a morning egg dish, but it was excellent: freshly baked, puffy and delicious. The crepe filled with brie, fresh tart apples and Black Forest ham was a shade stingy on the ingredients, but a visually pleasing and satisfying dish. Truman loved the smoked lox plate.

We shared the only dessert item on the brunch menu a soft crepe folded around baked cinnamon apples and topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, very nice (prices for the 10 items on the single-page menu range from $6 to $8.50).

At the end of the meal, Carol Ann orded a cappuccino and out came the box of pellets again. There must be something to this Nespresso idea, because Carol Ann gushed that the aroma of the coffee was "absolutely heavenly."