Title: Brush Broom Café
Author: GCS
Last saved by: ENU

Broom Bush Café
2725 San Pablo Avenue Berkeley, CA
(No website; Yelp reviews at http://www.yelp.com/biz/broom-bush-cafe-berkeley)

This is a very old diner which has had several different owners. The current owners are Korean, and they try very hard to please the neighborhood, in what is essentially a local competitor to IHOP and Denny’s down the street in Emeryville.

So people either love this place – because of the cheap, generous, decent food – or they hate it because it is old, and shows it. Not in the reasonably clean-retro chic way of Mama’s/Oakland or Royal/Albany, but by a certain grunginess around the corners and windows. The tables and floors are clean, but if you’ve always been reluctant to eat in your friend’s latest gritty hole-in-the-wall dive, you need to think twice about eating here.

Still, Carlos and I love breakfast so we checked out the place. It is, like any diner, heavy on the meat, and with its Korean owners, you can get standard American, teriyaki items, or Louisiana hot links. Given its location and menu, you won’t be surprised that we were the only non-AfroAms in the place.

We just ordered our usual eggs-and-meat breakfasts. The food is standard quality but it’s not greasy and the eggs are properly cooked, no burnt edges.

This isn’t up to the level of the breakfast places we prefer – Café M and the aforementioned Mama’s and Royal – but breakfast is an easy meal to ruin. We’ve eaten at a lot of places that cost as much or more, and did a worse job than Brush Broom.

It’s certainly cheap. Two breakfast plates, a side order of sausage, two beverages, with tip cost us only $32.