Audio By Carbonatix
20th Street Cafe is the polar opposite of a gastropub: It’s a working-class diner serving the simplest and most historic of restaurant foods with nothing more than Cokes, coffees and mugs of green tea to drink. It’s what restaurants were like before dining out became a big-time business and restaurants turned into destinations, used by people the same way they use celebrity sightings or nightclubs: as a way to count social coups, to make themselves feel like they’re really into one scene or another.
In operation since 1946, 20th Street has never been anything more than a modest neighborhood breakfast bar, offering eggs-and-bacon plates, cheeseburgers, tuna melts, green chile breakfast burritos, noodle bowls and chicken fried rice. Yes, you read that right: This modest neighborhood breakfast bar has a long tail, and a history stretching back to the days when nearby Sakura Square was the center of Asian-American (or Asian with no American at all) culture in this city. Sixty years later, those noodle bowls and plates of fried rice are still selling. And the breakfast burrito (served all day, from open ’til close at 2 p.m.) is more or less an institution itself.
Matter of fact, when I visited this joint last week, I did an unofficial poll of the dining room — and at around eleven in the morning, over half the people sitting at a table and every single person at the counter (myself included) was eating a breakfast burrito: big as a baby’s arm, topped with cheese, packed with eggs scrambled hard and excellent hash browns, and swimming in a puddle of thin, pork-studded green chile the consistency of Chinese-restaurant lobster sauce. While not the single greatest breakfast burrito in the city, it is — like nearly everything else on 20th Street’s short and sweet menu — solidly good. And a bargain at just five bucks and change.
