Dottie’s True Blue Cafe

On Friday, Ken and I went out for brunch near our hotel in San Francisco before meeting up with our friends to head to Sonoma. We looked around for a restaurant with good reviews and figured that Dottie’s True Blue Cafe was a safe bet. I didn’t think the lines would be very long because it was a weekday, but we ended up having to wait outside for about 40 minutes for brunch.

The neighborhood is on its way to becoming much nicer than it currently is, however, during our wait, there were some incidents where drugged out homeless people yelled at the people in line (the guy behind us was a tourist on his own and was harassed by someone who got into his face and yelled at him while eating a brownie). Even when we got into the vestibule of the restaurant, people were begging for money and loitering in the area. I have never been so happy to get to the front of the line because we were fully inside the restaurant!

While we were waiting, we reviewed the daily specials and the regular menu. The specials are listed on a chalkboard (and only on a chalkboard – our waiter suggested we go outside if we were interested in knowing what the specials were):

The popular items were also on the chalkboard by the entrance:

Ken and I decided not to order too much because we were going to Tartine Bakery afterwards (I have to go there everytime I’m in San Francisco, just like I have to go to Jimmy John’s and Portillo’s everytime I visit Chicago!). We ordered the blueberry pancakes:

And the whiskey fennel sausage scramble with jalapeno cornbread:

The pancakes were pretty good – they were moist, soft and fluffy. I still prefer Clinton St. Baking Company’s delicious blueberry pancakes, but these were pretty good. The scramble was also pretty good (and definitely tasted like something you could recreate easily at home). The jalapeno cornbread was on the drier side but they also give you some pepper jelly to pair with it (I preferred eating it with butter because the pepper jelly was way too sweet).

The brunch was pretty decent but I don’t think it was worth the wait and it was definitely not worth the trouble of standing in line and being afraid that someone was going to harass us in broad daylight. Next time, I’m going straight to Tartine!