The Crepe Café and Wine Bar

The Crepe Café’s warm lighting, wooden bookshelves, and casual-looking wine collection might remind you of your living room—provided it contains a few crepe griddles and plays host to a couple dozen strangers every weekend morning. This recently opened Ravenna restaurant is bound to enliven the neighborhood’s sleepy “downtown,” where Leah’s Bakery, Zeek’s Pizza, and the Bagel Oasis have long ruled the culinary roost. The Café is a good choice for brunch due to the aforementioned atmosphere, and because some of its crepe recipes are absolute home runs. The Monterey ($6.99) is a “they can’t really do that, can they?” experience: Stuffed with perfectly scrambled eggs, cheddar cheese, cream cheese (!), avocado (!!), and—to lighten things up, I guess—Roma tomatoes, it’s like the bastard child of a Dutch baby and an omelet, and it’s wonderful. Other choices, like the Westchester ($6.75), sound good on paper (Swiss cheese, caramelized onions, spinach, and tomatoes) but don’t quite come together on the plate (too many tomatoes), yet the quality of the ingredients wins the day almost every time. And the brilliant apple-and-cheddar crepe ($7.95), made with local apples, is the closest thing to normalized Franco-American relations we’re likely to see for a while. 2118 N.E. 65th St., 206-527-7147. RAVENNA