The Haymarket Cafe is the beating heart of NoHo, but, if you're not looking for it, you're very likely to walk right past it without noticing. Sandwiched between a couple of other businesses in a downtown block dating to 1868, the Haymarket's storefront is barely wide enough to accommodate its door and a tall window. Blink and you've already strolled by it. Instead of blinking, though, you're much more likely to be distracted by the hippies and buskers who congregate around the benches along this stretch of Main Street, singing Jewel songs and stroking their pet ducks. If, that is, your eyes aren't stinging from the smoke of clove cigarettes that assails them as you mosey by.
Should you manage to find your way inside, however, you will immediately see that you've stumbled upon something special. For one thing, the place will be much larger than you expected - not exactly capacious, but certainly cavernous, even commodious, especially when you spot the stairs leading to a lower level. In this way it will remind you of certain pubs and restaurants you've encountered in Europe, the sorts of places that look teensy from the sidewalk but that open up into grand palaces once you're inside, much of the space having clearly been gobbled up from adjacent establishments in some earlier age. Another thing you'll quickly notice is that the walls are painted with bright, just-shy-of-whimsical designs and adorned with antique prints, lithographs, and mirrors whose relationship to one another is purely circumstantial. Which is to say they don't match, but that doesn't really matter. Scoot further inside and you'll spot two display cases offering pastries both hearty and decadent. If it's still morning you might opt for an oatcake - though I'd recommend one of the moist, soft fruit-and-nut bars instead, if they've got them - and if it's afternoon you'll probably spring for a cupcake or two. You'll also notice that, in addition to the usual range of coffee products, the Haymarket is an honest-to-goodness juice bar with all sorts of ways to satisfy your juice jones.
If this is a normal day, by which I mean a day in which you didn't come to the Haymarket for french toast, you'll get your coffee/juice and oatcake/cupcake and grab a seat upstairs, if you can find one. You'll settle into your seat and look around. And then you'll notice that the the Haymarket is a buzzing microcosm of NoHo life, the patrons and staff a virtual cross-section of the local citizenry. There are the burly, friendly lesbians behind the counter, with their tattooes and flannels; there the placid lesbian couple with their Asian baby. There's the guy with the long, permed hair who looks like he used to be in the J Geils Band and whom you're pretty sure is a professor at Smith; here, indeed, is a table full of his probable students, chattery young Smithies wearing Uggs. There's the young, punky guy with three (three!) eyebrow-rings and close-cropped hair knitting (knitting!) some sort of pink baby sweater; there's the group of sweatshirted grad students you always see pecking away at their laptops. Here's someone doing some sort of complex graphic design and taking a phone call a little to loudly. There's a bearded guy who just stumbled in with a beat-up guitar case looking for the bathroom. Behind you you hear a conversation about academic politics or, possibly, plain old politics politics. Here comes a handful of blinking tourists. Oh! And there's the guy you privately call The Highlander, the one you see stomping around town in his green kilt and multicolored knitted cap with earflaps and strings that sway to and fro above his shoulders as he barrels past you. Man, that is one fascinating dude.
As you can probably tell, I spend a lot of time at the Haymarket. It's one of my standard coffee-shop haunts, the place I go on those mornings when I manage to get out of my pajamas before noon (after noon it gets much harder to find a seat there, and I usually end up at the less-popular Yellow Sofa instead). I've even had quite a few meals there - downstairs they serve delicious soups, sandwiches, and salads - but until recently I was completely unaware that they serve french toast as well. Well they do, and it's among the best in the Valley that I've had so far.
To get it I had to take a seat downstairs (under a black-and-white poster of Emiliano Zapata proclaiming "Tierra Y Libertad," at a table sporting some faux-naive-arts-&-crafts-movement stenciling) and let myself be served by what I can only call a waitress - table service is unusual in coffee shops of any kind, and the Haymarket provides it in the morning only, downstairs only. Unlike the menu at Stables, which offered a dizzying array of french toasts that put me in a bit of a moral noose, the Haymarket offers only one variety of the dish, the "bourbon french toast," and so I was free to indulge my growing desire for the fanciest, schmanciest french toast I could find - and to hell with science. So order it I did. It looked like this:
Served with real maple syrup, a handful of fresh fruit, and some creme fraiche dotted with candied pecans, the toast itself could have been bland as butter and the meal still would have been delicious. Fortunately, the toast was also quite good. I didn't taste much bourbon, but with the syrup and creme and pecans more flavor would have probably left me feeling overwhelmed and confused. The bread itself appeared to be a kind of sourdough, the sort of bread that would be crusty (on the outside) and rubbery (on the inside) if eaten dry, but, having been dipped in egg stuff, fried, and slathered in sugar and cream, it acquitted itself quite well, retaining remarkable structural integrity when many lesser breads would have disintegrated into porridge (I'm looking at you, Stables). That said, a heartier bread - something whole-grain, maybe, with lots of oats - would have been even better, and it's this slight reservation that's preventing me from declaring this the early, odds-on favorite to win the title of TPFT. Right now, though, it's the one to beat.
The ante has just been upped.
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