Inside: Cheeky's

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Restaurateurs have told me that there's little, if any, money to be made on breakfast, which is why I have always been intrigued by places that specialize in the first meal of the day — and by natural chronological extension, lunch.

When a chef produces a breakfast that's a step out of the ordinary in quality and creativity, I'm impressed.

I've found a great new breakfast pleasure, very close to home. Tara Lazar, the owner of Cheeky's on North Palm Canyon Drive, changes its menu every week, and there's always something on it that's unexpected enough to tempt me. This week, the poached eggs were accompanied by polenta and leeks with arugula pesto.

Not that it's all unexpected. The menu has the conventional list of breakfast staples — but usually with enough of a twist to seem fresh again. The eggs Benedict, for example, is served with sautéed arugula and a cheddar scone, courtesy of Deb, the pastry chef.

The lunch menu is similarly constructed, with regular items like chicken salad, meatloaf sandwich or burger (grass-fed with pesto fries) with more unusual items also on the list.

I asked Tara how she came to decide on a breakfast and lunch place. I recalled that Café Amusé, recently closed and much lamented, had originally opened serving breakfast and lunch only but quickly started providing dinners, too.

"I was tired of cooking breakfasts at home," she said, slightly flippantly.

More exactly, she had noticed a dearth of breakfast places in the area and thought she could fill that vacancy. It doesn't mean that she has changed from cooking breakfast at home to cooking many more at the restaurant.

"It's all my recipes and my menu, but I have great people working for me," she said.

She owes the eclecticism of her menu to family training.

"My mom's Chinese," she explained, "and Dad was an entertainment lawyer and a foodie, and we were always eating." He also traveled a lot, taking the family with him. They didn't always just go to four-star restaurants.

"He would follow the truckers," she said. The truck drivers, he reasoned, knew the best places to eat and when they stopped, the family stopped - and ate. There were a lot of successful food adventures as a result.

Italian touches come from the fact that Tara married an Italian. Mexican elements she inherited because her parents lived in Mexico for six years before she was born and loved Mexican food.

"That's a very big influence," she said.

Another major influence comes from simply following the seasons and the season's produce. She will generally plan an overall menu, then adapt it at the last minute because of a missing ingredient or a suddenly available one. When we spoke, she had persimmons on the menu because they were there and she couldn't resist the challenge

"And when a big ingredient doesn't arrive, I ask myself, 'Do I change the menu or do a different version?'

"You need to be always ready to switch and change.

"I'm so tired of 'comfort food' - it always tastes the same!" she said. She likes a BLT, but in her version, the lettuce is likely to be arugula and the tomatoes yellow - and it may be a BLT salad. (She offers a fun "flight" of bacon — smokehouse, jalapeño, applewood or honey smoked.)

She goes to great lengths, though, to avoid being thought trendy. "If a customer says about something: 'That's all the rage in L.A.,' I'll yell 'Take it off the menu!'" she confessed, laughing.

Another reason to be ready to change.

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