Last week, I took a break from hunting for the perfect cloche hat on Melrose to have brunch. The Melrose strip of shops in Los Angeles is seedy, creative, hipster, and features sidewalks pitted with holes and chips, even in front of boutique shops like Fluevog. It’s also lined with great new restaurants that are, like their patrons, slaves to the latest trends. Although we were hungry, my shopping buddy and I passed up the first restaurant since it was packed to burst with people wanting to see and be scene (purely intentional misspelling), and decided that we would patronize the next establishment we came across that didn’t have a wait. The Village Idiot on Melrose, an English Pub done hipster-style, called to us like an old friend.
Snark aside (it’s so easy to be snarky when talking about Los Angeles), The Village Idiot is everything a pub should be, and everything a hipster pub should be. The menu is stacked with classics, like the English Breakfast, but done exceptionally well according to the most recent trends. My ham came from a farm, my sausage was made in-house, and my eggs had yolks the color of which can only come from chickens fed on the best stuff (ie. not corn and bits of other processed chickens – blech). The beans were Heinz. A nice touch that legitimized what would otherwise be an English Breakfast so gourmet as to hardly be English at all. (The beans are under those beautiful eggs)
And, unlike any English pub in England (in my experience), the coffee was incredibly good. Another hipster touch I couldn’t help but love.
Hipsters. Melrose. English pub. The combination should not work, but I cannot wait to go back.