Hot Meal: 'Good Morning Breakfast' at Bar Tartine

J. Birdsall

The breakfast sandwich: Quietly deft.

​Used to be only prep cooks and cleaning crews who showed up early mornings at restaurants. But eateries are trying to get you in the doors -- whenever they can get you, frankly -- and if that means staffing up with a short-order a.m. line cook and server, so be it.

This morning, Bar Tartine joined Pizzaiolo and Salt House as members of the Bay Area's Breakfast Club, dinner-focused restaurants with casual morning service. Tartine's Good Morning Breakfast offers half a dozen options, a couple of house-baked pastries, and coffee drinks extracted from Four Barrel beans (though on day one, the java was Blue Bottle).

J. Birdsall

An apple fritter from Tartine Bakery.

​A breakfast sandwich ($7.50) of scrambled egg and house-cured bacon piled on a split biscuit was quietly deft: egg curds of almost custardy lightness and subtly smoky bacon on a biscuit with a buttery aura. Honestly? It was the sprinkle of mixed chopped parsley and thyme that gave the thing a kind of delicately weedy lift. Nice.

Poached hunks of tangy-sweet fruit studded a bakery-made apple fritter ($2.75). The soft-textured bran muffin ($2.50) was all about surprise, from the coarse-sand crunch of demerara that dusted it to the snarl of salted maple butter that came with.

Pretty much the most refined start to a Wednesday we can remember having.

Good Morning Breakfast at Bar Tartine 561 Valencia (at 16th St. ), 487-1600. Wed-Fri, 8-11 a.m.