CJ's Cafe

Take Out Cozy, Family Friendly, Laid Back Casual Juice Bar, Cafe / Coffee House Moderately noisy Outdoor Seating

Sunday morning at CJ's Café. Over at the next table, two guys are having catfish and chicken wings, respectively, with eggs and grits. Outside the window, a young mother is doing the leisurely sidewalk-dining thing at one of the four outdoor tables, breakfasting on Mexican goat stew while she reads the paper and her daughter deals with a plate of pancakes.

That's Mid-City for you, and that's CJ's. It's a neighborhood Mexican restaurant that also serves soul food, and it has a few other surprises up its sleeve as well.

The front room looks like a basic lunch counter, if you ignore that quasi-psychedelic desert landscape on one wall, the one with the blushing pink sky. A quieter, much smaller room with a higher proportion of booths to tables, located just past the cash register, sports another faintly hallucinatory painting, this one showing an intertidal zone complete with three-dimensional sea foam and starfish.

The menu lists breakfast and lunch dishes, which are all available as long as the restaurant is open, from early morning to late afternoon every day.

You can get all the usual Mexican egg breakfasts, such as huevos rancheros: an egg sunny side up on a tortilla with some fried chorizo, fragrant with cumin and anise. One of the surprises here is sincronizada (I have not received a convincing explanation of the name), a great big quesadilla filled with Cheddar, Jack and thick chunks of ham. It's rich and funky, and it makes a real plateful.

American-style breakfasts are mostly the familiar combinations of meat and eggs any style, though the meats include turkey bacon, salmon and chicken wings as well as the usual pork products. They come with toast or a grilled biscuit and a choice of rice, cornmeal grits or rather mushy home fries, which approach the texture of fried mashed potatoes.

The wall specials (which have remained unchanged for months) include a couple of exotic omelets such as one known as the deli: a paper-thin omelet wrapped around a pile of corned beef, American cheese and decently garlicky pastrami. In the absence of deli mustard, I splashed mine with hot sauce; not bad. There are also pancakes and French toast.

Soul food lunch entrées, listed as Daily Dinners, come with a cornmeal muffin and a choice of two sides such as collards, black-eyed peas or a nicely cooked (probably steamed) mix of broccoli and cauliflower. The entrées include fried catfish and chicken wings and peppery-gravy-smothered red meats such as tender oxtails or a heaping plate of meaty short ribs.

It's among the Mexican main dishes that two of the most striking items are found. Pierna al horno, helpfully explained on the menu as "spicy roast pork," actually seems to be stewed or braised rather than roasted. At any rate, it's wonderfully meaty and tender and, as the pink-brown color of its sauce hints, it's cooked with hot, smoky chipotle peppers.

This is one snappy, appetizing plate of pig, and it doesn't even need the lime and chopped onions it comes with (by comparison, CJ's rather rudimentary version of birria does). Pierna al horno also shows up in the torta al pastor (roasted pork sandwich) and the burrito al pastor, but the platter is really the way to savor it.

The tortas are a good deal, by the way -- they're on a French roll, making them bigger than the sandwiches (made on your choice of breads), and they include avocado as well as lettuce and tomato. But as it happens, I'd still take the steak sandwich over the carne asada torta, because the sandwich comes with sweet fried onions on the thinly sliced steak.

The other great thing to look for in this part of the menu is pollo a la plancha. It's chicken -- I'd say probably roasted -- that's shredded and fried with onions, bell peppers and tomatoes. It's something like fajitas but more flavorful, because of the extra browning of the chicken. This same shredded chicken also shows up in the chicken enchilada, and the result is chewier but far more memorable than the usual boiled variety.

There are no desserts at all at CJ's Café. But if do you want something sweet, you can get a big glass of fresh squeezed juice -- orange, carrot, celery or beet. Along with the juice comes a glass filled with ice, in case you want your juice chilled.

At $1.88, it's a bargain -- and the last surprise CJ's has up its sleeve.

CJ's Café
Best dishes: Sincronizada, pollo a la plancha, short ribs, pierna al horno (spicy roast pork), carrot juice.
Prices: Breakfast, $3.50 to $7.75; sandwiches, $2.75 to $5; dinner, $5.25 to $7.50.
Details: No alcohol. Parking lot in back and street parking.

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