Local restaurant dishes up comfort and hospitality along with beignets, fresh-squeezed juice
With Lucile’s claiming the title of “Best Breakfast in Boulder,” I had to see if the food was really any better than other breakfast choices around town.
Lucile’s, 2124 14th St., certainly has an original look. The Cajun restaurant, which serves both breakfast and lunch is in a bright yellow house with a large front porch. Along with the friendly yellow walls, the house has white curtains and flower-print cloth napkins to give the restaurant an at-home feel.
Half the menu is breakfast food, and the other half is lunch food. The breakfast side of the menu looks more typical for Colorado, while the lunch side and the Mardi Gras pictures on the walls look as if they came straight from Louisiana.
To start, we ordered beignets. Our server said they were a type of donut, but I would describe them as looking and tasting more like sugar-covered scones. They were hot, crisp and delicious, and although they were not what I was expecting, I was glad we decided to order them.
We also ordered some grapefruit juice, freshly squeezed by our server, which was out of this world. It was more like eating a grapefruit instead of drinking juice from one.
For the entree, I ordered the pain perdu: New Orleans-style French toast; served with fresh fruit, one egg, hot Louisiana sausage and buttery syrup. I ordered my eggs over-easy but, because of a mistake by our server, they ended up being scrambled. They tasted good anyway. The sausage was good; however, the server also accidentally gave me the mild instead of the hot sausage. The fruit included grapes, mango, pineapple and apple, which were all fresh. The best part was the French toast and the syrup. Sprinkled with powdered sugar, the toast was sweet, crisp and had a wonderful texture. The syrup was perfect – Lucile’s should sell it by the bottle.
One of my lunch companions ordered the farmer’s eggs: Potatoes, onions, peppers, cheddar cheese, sausage and three eggs all scrambled together. Although this dish is not much to look at, it is tasty. The veggies were fresh, the dish had plenty of cheese and though it wasn’t very spicy, the hot sauce our server gave us added just the right amount of zing. The dish also came with a biscuit, which was fantastic with Lucile’s strawberry jam.
My other dining guest decided to try something off the lunch menu. He ordered crawfish etouffee: Louisiana crawfish tails smothered in a rich, brown, spicy sauce served over rice. This dish was spicier than our other breakfast dishes. The crawfish sat atop a pile of rice, surrounded by a moat of sauce. The fish was tender and had excellent flavor. Lucile’s used white rice and didn’t offer another rice variety for the dish that might have been better. This dish also came with corn bread straight out of the oven.
Entrees at Lucile’s range from $7 to $15 on average, which is a bit steep for breakfast foods, but the portions are huge. If you go with another person, you could easily split one entr
