Jason Kwon’s latest brings gourmet comfort food to Southside. But can Telegraph Avenue handle it?

Traveling in trendy East Bay restaurant circles is kind of like being on a drunken bender. With drunken benders it shares that anything-goes euphoria, that sense of being way too avant-garde to call oneself avant-garde. Sure, on drunken benders you get to sing “Bohemian Rhapsody” and berate your boss, while in trendy East Bay restaurants you get to taste ant-egg aioli and Count Chocula cheesecake. But benders end, as do trendy-dining bouts: Hark those come-to-catsup moments when you’ve had it with kale salad and you stagger, moaning, toward the nearest patty melt.

Next time this happens, stagger toward the Bleecker Bistro: In the Telegraph Avenue space formerly occupied by Ann’s Kitchen, award-winning chef-restaurateur Jason Kwon—whose sky-high standards and innovative expertise have since 2011 transformed his premier effort Joshu-Ya Brasserie, right around the corner, into one of Berkeley’smost talked-about seafood hotspots—now helms this willfully humble home-away-from home.

Inspired by a venerable diner near the Greenwich Village apartment where Kwon lived 10 years ago as a fresh-out-of-college Goldman Sachs employee—“it was cool and hip but with a homeyness I’d never experienced before,” the Bay Area native says now—high-ceilinged, big-windowed Bleecker Bistro offers sweeping 180-degree Southside vistas, for better or for worse.

“This neighborhood is very much like the Lower East Side: rich in culture, but not opulent. You don’t see people walking around here in suits,” Kwan observes across a blonde wooden tabletop.

Out of the bistro’s hidden kitchen come such pleasers as cinnamon-gilded French toast; avocado-amped tender tuna Niçoise; and plump, juicy hamburgers topped with cheddar, ranch, bacon, lettuce, tomato, our old friend avocado, and crispy-edged fried eggs. Yes, all perched simultaneously on the same patty, which is Niman Ranch beef.

You could call it highly conscious comfort food.

Announcing whole-wheat pancakes, chicken-noodle soup, Philly cheesesteaks, Caesar salad, and dozens more comforting classics above the spic-and-span counter where orders are taken, its menu looms like a vast vertical welcome mat.

“Whatever you choose will be good,” asserts the lady awaiting your order, and you pretty much know she’s right if for no other reason than that all this food is so familiar. No arcane puzzlers or sneaky surprises rear up here as they do in too-cool hipster hubs: No harissa-jelly joybuzzers, no fennel-foam whoopie cushions. You know hot-pastrami sand-wiches, Western omelets, and burritos—even if some of Bleecker Bistro’s burritos contain pesto, bacon, ham and eggs. You know them and like them, and arguably so does a vast cross-section of America, and that’s the point. The very words “BLT” and “home” are mantras of a kind, neutralizing the mental/intestinal static imposed by fancy food, inducing inner peace, relief, and recognition: After all, what’s comfort food but long-lost pals?

A spinach-mushroom-grilled-cheese sandwich is golden-crispy outside, luxuriantly chewy-gooey inside. You can tell it was layered carefully, according to a plan. You can taste the freshness and seasonality of its abundant vegetables, and you can tell without a doubt that this is real cheese. Alongside it comes a scoop of potato salad as pale and gentle as a springtime Sunday afternoon: But each bite yields a clandestine complexity, all perfect spicing and infinitesimal crunch.

Mac-and-cheese is made here with orecchiette, which stands up to the teeth like deliciously stalwart little coins, making the dish last almost if not quite as long as you like. But what might most mandate second and third helpings is Kwon’s coleslaw, which like so much else here appears unprepossessing but absolutely, sweet-and-sourly sings: Its game-changing ingredient is the same complicated vinaigrette that’s used at Joshu-Ya, but Kwon won’t reveal any of its many components besides sugar, mayonnaise, and cider vinegar.

This isn’t just a bistro. It’s philosophy in action: “In New York, chefs create spectacles. They’re all, ‘Stand back and look at me, then eat what I make.’ In Berkeley the dynamic is different. It’s all about the people, the customers, and giving them what they want. Sure, I can cook, but what do they want? They want comfort and familiarity, but they demand quality. Whether it’s a student or a professor or a VIP, every customer in Berkeley wants to be respected in all ways—including via their food.

“And I want to give them that. I want their day to be enriched by this experience. We’re not a Michelin-starred restaurant, but we have a vision—and respecting the Berkeley customer is a big part of it.”

Thus we find ourselves savoring not just potato salad and coleslaw, but primal, primeval, primordial potato salad and coleslaw. They might take a while to reach your table, because service can be slow here, but they’re worth the wait.

Take the gourmet chef away from his salmon crudo and tuna tartare and place him around the corner amidst mayonnaise and burger buns, and he’s still a gourmet chef.

Certain hipster chefs strive to reconfigure comfort foods in ways so pointless as to assault, insult, invert, and pervert them. (Curried popcorn and chipotle chocolate, I’m looking at you.) At Bleecker Bistro, comfort-food classics are nothing more and nothing less than themselves: not dressed up but dressed down, then down again to their pure components, which Kwon buys from small independent purveyors.

Topped with thousand-island dressing, a vegetarian soy burger is as deftly charred and filling as its fleshy pals. Flecks and flutes of scarlet skin swirl in Kwon’s creamy-tangy tomato bisque: a soup that nearly stands up and soothes: There, there. With heaping helpings of cheddar, eggs, pico de gallo, and thick hearty home fries, this fare brings your heart—well, home.

Kwon’s love for cooking “struck during my 20s, when I was traveling extensively. Fortunately, I was able to discover this thing that I was good at. If I was a recorder player, I’d want to be the world’s best. I’m a chef. So the question is: How good can I get?”

So far, so very good. Costing no more than a large cafe-style coffee drink (which are served here too, as is breakfast all day), a Bleecker Bistro milkshake evokes vintage soda fountains: lumpy, chunky, big enough for two and dense enough to devour, top to bottom, with spoons. Kwon says wistfully that customers sometimes complain about his shakes—because they’re so unlike super-smooth, sickly-sweet, lukewarm, gelatinous, typically ice-cream-free fast-food shakes.

This purity, this intensity, this charity—a percentage of Bleecker Bistro’s proceeds benefit Alameda-based Build Hope International—is nothing short of noble. But can it succeed in Southside?

Blocks away, students line up for corporate comfort food at Chipotle and Melt. Nothing against Chipotle and Melt, because both are great at what they do, but what if we stood outside their windows urging patrons to try the house-made, non-chain, gourmet-ified real thing?

Because it’s never too late to learn that coleslaw does not spring into existence, fully formed, in plastic tubs.

Bleecker Bistro | American

2498 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley, 510-548-8885 BleeckerBistro.com
Open Daily: Breakfast 8–11:30am Lunch| 11:30am–4pm Dinner 4–8pm Accepts credit cards. No alcohol served as of press time. Prices under $10.