Rustic Bakery - Cafe, Novato

1407 Grant Ave, Novato CA

(415) 878-4952

Parking: street parking
Hours: Daily 7 am - 5pm
http://www.rusticbakery.com/ 

Last Visited: April 8, 2011

Food: 3 to 4 stars

Atmosphere: 3 stars

Service: 2 to 3 stars

Price: $ to $$

A local bakery with great pastries and great bread.  Isn't that what everyone longs for near their house?  Drop by for a snack or leisurely, but simple, weekend breakfast?  That's what I was looking for here.  When you walk into Rustic, you'll see the counter on the left with a case featuring lots of pastries, seating on your right and adjacent to the window in front of the counter, and the kitchen in the rear has a window so you can see what is being done in the back (the photo above shows the window to the kitchen). Some fresh flowers are in vases throughout the room.

Two young ladies were behind the counter and while they were not rude, they weren't particularly warm either.  After ordering at the counter, I sat at one of the tables on the right.  Although my friend had ordered first, my sandwich and soup came first.  These are some of the pet peeves that I have - unless they tell you ahead of time that your order will take a long time, it should come in a reasonable amount of time - I don't know why my panini took 15 minutes to make since they weren't that busy.  The second pet peeve is that the food should be served in the order that it was ordered in.  In this case, my friend had a grilled cheese, but mine still came first.  For these reasons, service falls from three stars down to two to three stars.

- Ham and Cheese Sandwich with Soup - Today's soup was minestrone.  I was pleased with the heartiness of the soup.  There was a lot of carrots, onions, some tomato, and small macaroni.  The croutons were very good (but you do expect that at a bakery) and the soup temperature was hot.  The grilled cheese and ham sandwich was very good - probably because the bread was outstanding and the thin slices of ham gave it all a wonderful texture. Good flavors and good quality ingredients.  $8.95

When my plate came, they forgot to give me a spoon for the sopu, and while it's unclear whether or not silverware is self-serve here, they had run out of spoons and I had to wait for them to wash some spoons before getting one.  That only added to the wait time.  After another three to five minutes, my dining companion got her food too. 

While the sandwich and soup were good, the service has a lot of room for improvement.  Hopefully they have worked through the kinks since my visit - they were still fairly new at the time.  Otherwise, their dine-in orders will probably drop a bit.