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Business Briefs

Cafe is Great for Lunch, Leave Room for Dessert

Roger Brigham
Emeryville Connection Staff
June 2008

A good cup of coffee and a warm flakey croissant – such are the hallmarks of a good neighborhood café.

Café Aquarius has all that and more.

Lost amid the seemingly endless construction and road work going on all around it, Café Aquarius is another one of those unpretentious must-eat eateries Emeryville is swiftly becoming known for.

Aquarius opened last August with a bakery and café operation. In March it added breakfast service and in April it started serving lunch. Both are well done – try their blackened fish sandwich made with fresh halibut and remoulade sauce, or the panko crusted fried chicken salad in buttermilk dressing – but the bakery goodies and desserts remain their signature offerings.

Not surprising that owner Patrick Feehan is a cook-turned-baker at heart.

“I started in the mid-80s when California cuisine was just beginning to happen,” he said. “I was a bus boy and a waiter. I worked at Square One Restaurant, and then I decided in 1990 to go into baking.”

After working several years with Grace Baking Company, he moved around a s a pastry chef and then managed the Ultimate Cookie Company, a cookie wholesaler in San Francisco.

“The bakers ate the mad scientists of the culinary world,” he said when asked what made baking so appealing to him. “No offense to cooks, but we (bakers) can look at a kitchen and know what’s going on; they look at baking in the kitchen and they don’t have a clue what’s going on.”

Aquarius makes all of its desserts and baked items on site: scones, cheesecakes, lemon curd tartlets – this is not the place to go if you’re worried about calories. But the cuisine obviously clicks with the on-the-go office workers and neighborhood residents who pack the place come lunchtime.

“People are clamoring for weekend hours and dinner service,” Feehan said. “When we first opened they wanted us to offer breakfast and lunch. We wanted to give it to them, but we wanted to make sure we did it the way we wanted to.”

Feehan said he’s applied for a liquor license to serve beer and wine, and said he hopes to open on weekends by mid autumn and then to start dinner service after that.

Can’t wait to see what’s for

dessert.

Roger Brigham is a writer for The Emeryville

Connection. If you have a question or comment, please contact him at ecocnews@gmail.com