Jimmy Bean's FIFO Cafe - American, Berkeley

1290 6th Street (at Gilman), Berkeley, CA

(510) 528-3435

Parking: Street parking
Hours: Mon - Thurs 6:30am to 9pm, Fri 6:30am - 9:30pm, Sat 7am - 9:30pm, Sun 7am - 9pm

http://www.jimmybeans.com/

Last Visited: August 7, 2010

Food: 2 stars

Atmosphere: 3 stars

Service: 3 stars

Price: $ to $$

Jimmy Bean’s FIFO Café is more of a café than restaurant. Their menu says that they serve American, Southwestern, and Middle Eastern favorites. While my first encounter with them was eating their food at the UC Berkeley campus, today’s outing was at Jimmy Bean’s primarily because my friends had their dog with them and we needed to find a place that was dog-friendly.

Both inside and outside, the atmosphere is casual. We sat outdoors and noticed that the sign outside the place showed that a three course dinner was available for only $15. That made our decision for dinner pretty simple.

The dinner menu includes pizza, roasted chicken, roasted fish, and sandwiches. Today’s main dish special for the three course meal was paella. The waitress was pretty excited about it and gave it good reviews, so three of four people in our party ordered the paella.

Even though it wasn’t that long ago that I was here, I can’t recall if I ordered soup or salad. I also can’t recall what the dessert was – except that it was a slice of something – probably cheesecake, but quite honestly, it wasn’t memorable, and I usually remember.

- Famous Paella – The paella comes with halibut, clams, mussels, shrimp, chicken, sausage, vegetables, white wine infused fish stock, garlic and fresh herbs. All of this goes over saffron rice and is topped with lemon aioli. While the menu says the dish is served with grilled bread, I don’t remember any and the photo doesn’t show it. What I do remember is that the rice was really oily. The presentation was cute with the little wok and the amount of food for the price was good, but I thought the overall dish was just okay. It ranks pretty low on the list of my paella experiences, even though I haven’t had many of those.

We thought the dessert presentation was also nice and service was very friendly, but when it comes down to the core of the meal, I wasn’t that impressed. It was better in concept than in execution and reminded me of cafeteria food. I don’t have plans to go back for dinner, although the place was pretty busy the night that we went. On the plus side, service was very friendly and attentive throughout our time there, although we were missing silverware for a little bit.  To me, Jimmy Bean’s is more ideal for breakfast, lunch, or a snack, but it's nice to know some places are trying to provide a better version of a value meal.