Groat Expectation

The best cowboy breakfasts may be an hour away out toward Pearblossom, and the best place for dim sum seems to change every week, but everybody seems to know the best regular-guy breakfast place on the Westside, which is why on weekend mornings at John O’Groats the line spills out onto the pavement, fills the benches and even wanders over to check out the par-3 course at Rancho Park just down the block. Fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice, sourdough French toast with a side of Vermont syrup, crunchy pecan waffles: John O’Groats has it all.

The place is sort of genteel, really--patterned blue wallpaper like the kind your grandmother used to have, a mounted fish over the coffee machine, a splendid waitress named Angelica who has been asking, “Biscuits or toast?” since the restaurant opened more than 10 years ago. The U-shaped counter seems equally at home occupied by country-club women in tennis dresses and grotty UCLA film majors who look as if they haven’t slept in a week . . . or even by hamburger-ordering Sikhs.

There is a town called John o’Groat’s at the northernmost point in Scotland, a cod’s toss from the Orkneys, but the menu here is pretty much all-American--no finnan haddie or haggis or anything like that, just bacon and eggs, fried ham and eggs, spicy turkey sausage and eggs, wonderful asparagus omelets. Also, there seem to be no actual groats around, which is kind of a relief, though there is something called Huevos O’Groats that I’ve never been brave enough to try.

Instead, there are buckwheat pancakes dotted with fresh blueberries or with pecans, bowls of ripe bananas in heavy cream, and great servings of oatmeal--the imported steel-cut kind, served with cream and fruit and sugar. Egg dishes come with crisp home-fried potatoes. Fat, smoked pork chops are ruddy to the bone, intensely smoky, salty as prosciutto; eggs Benedict, very fine, are made with profoundly smoky ham and a lemony hollandaise.

But essentially, everybody comes for the buttermilk biscuits. High, vaguely beehive-shaped things, light and soft with a crunchy exterior, they easily split into four or five warm layers. They do have a slight, bitterish tang of baking soda that some people consider a fault, but it brings out the essential sweetness of the biscuits themselves--if you don’t pile on too much marmalade.

Except for a very nice version of fish and chips--moist, a little chewy, with a shatteringly crisp fried crust--the lunchtime stuff here tends to be one sort of brawny dad food or another: sloppy patty melts made with two-inch slabs of meat; quesadillas stuffed with everything you might conceivably put into an omelet; manly Cobb salads that contain giant amounts of the restaurant’s unusually good smoked ham and are served with sides of strange, thick poppy-seed dressing.

On the other hand, breakfast is served all day.

* John O’Groats

10516 W. Pico Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 204-0692. Open Monday-Friday, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Cash only. No alcohol. Parking off alley in rear. Breakfast for two, food only, $9-$14.