Cafe Pacifica isn't quite smooth sailing yet

Vanessa Lakey’s philosophy toward food is good ingredients and lots of them.

So at her new downtown restaurant, Café Pacifica, the California native — and longtime local — tries to serve simple food right. You will never find a rock-hard avocado or Styrofoam-flavored tomato in her sandwiches. Her green chiles only come from Hatch, New Mexico (the Paris of peppers). And she winces at the very idea of serving anything but real maple syrup with her French toast.

“How could you pour that Aunt Jemima stuff on nice French Toast?” she said recently.

While she is an ace with ingredients, (Her fantastic green chile once won first prize at the New Mexico state fair) the restaurant has a flustered flow and a schizophrenic personality that may leave customers a bit confused.

Café Pacifica, despite its name, has little to do with the Pacific. There is no fish beyond a shrimp salad. Instead, the restaurant serves sandwiches, quiche, soup, burgers and breakfast. It also plans to add smoked barbecue from Pueblo ... and perhaps stay open late-night to trawl for the bar crowd.

Some of its offerings are quite good. Others leave you wondering if they were thought through.

The French toast ($5), is top tier. Thick rounds of soft, doughy baguette slaked in egg and cinnamon come out crispy on the edges and almost custardy in the middle.

The panini are like nothing I have ever seen: Fluffy, chewy, yeasty and delicious fresh-made flat bread is wrapped around your choice of lunch meats and veggies ($6). The resulting roll of food is so huge that when a server set in down in front of me, a friend quipped, “That makes you look like a hobbit.”

The burgers, a half-pound of Ranch Foods Direct beef ($7), are also good. But the giant potato wedges served alongside don’t work. Lakey dissects whole russets into 2-inch thick wedges, then tosses them in the fryer, but the spuds are so thick that by the time the outside is ready, the inside is still nearly raw.

Other problems dog the restaurant. The restaurant pays scant attention to its own hours. The staff, besides Lakey, is too young and inexperienced. They can’t seem to master the cash register, the phones, or the art of delivering food for a table at even close to the same time.

Twice I went to visit and found the “OPEN” sign dark, as if the place was closed. On the third visit I tried the door anyway and found they were open, the guy at the counter had just forgotten to turn on the sign.

Pacifica has other things going for it. The space is bright and attractive. A rooftop patio will be a draw in spring, and it sits on a rare block in downtown Colorado Springs where you can almost always find parking, and Lakey plans to begin serving outstanding smoked chicken, pork and brisket from Andy’s Smokehouse in Pueblo this month, as well as Andy’s smoked tamales, but Pacifica needs practice if its going to stay in the game. Downtown can be a very friendly place for eclectic, family-owned restaurants, but because of that, it is also home to fierce competition.

Cafe Pacifica

***

(Lots of potential)

Address: 12 N. Nevada Ave.

Phone: 375-1325

Hours 7 a.m.-4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays

Entrees: $3.50-$7

Vegetarian: Salads

Alcohol: No

Credit cards: Yes