Lili's

The restaurant is on the corner of a block with space to eat outside at small round tables.

Indoors, it's like being inside of a very nice gift box or a giant petit-four. The place would be a great still-shot backdrop for a lighthearted cartoon.

The color of choice seems to be the spectrum of beige, from cream to chocolate with a hint of pink. Wide robin's-egg-blue stripes appear on the parts of the walls that don't have windows or circle mirrors, and the cabinets are what I'll call green tea with milk or cream olive forest green. The chairs are autumn-windfall-apple red.

Flowers, still-life russet-goldenrod fireworks lean silently against
each table's vase.

Quiet jazz (catch the trumpet?) from the radio matches the floor: vanilla cream and medium-brown outline paintings of kitchen utensils, each labeled with smooth curly-edge brushmanship.

A friend and I eat outside,
After much deliberation and indecision (so many good ideas), she orders the Tex Mex Breakfast, and I the Cornmeal Pancakes with Apple Compote and Caramel. They're so good that during the course of our meal, we switch plates twice.
Hers is some magical synthesis of beans/rice/salsa with a fried egg on top and ample guacamole served in a ceramic medium-dark blue bowl with a handle that makes it look as if it might have been raised with the saucepans.

I've never had cornmeal in pancakes before and I don't expect wheat to come anywhere near it anytime soon. Two slabs of pancake, served slightly off-center on a smooth white ceramic plate, were topped with an inviting pile of apple compote laced about with caramel. I think perhaps the best justice I can do to this pancake is again to list the ingredients:

*cornmeal pancakes
(Not grainy at all, but soft and very willing to separate when prompted by a fork)
*apple compote
little chips of apple in a little hill with cinnamon
*caramel
drizzled in an artistic entropic fashion.
Not too sweet to cover the cornmeal, not too much to make anything soggy, just enough to know that its there and mixing with the apple.





I know.. the flowers in these pictures are differently colored than I described... but that's because they use fresh flowers!