3 Kitsilano Brunch Spots Worth Getting Up For

Credit: Flickr / Muy Yum

Aphrodite’s Organic Cafe in Kitsilano, Vancouver. Everything ends with pie.

Brunching in Kitsilano is a time-honoured tradition; one that, if you do it right, involves standing in line for an hour, surreptitiously listening in on the people in front of you and trying not to notice your stomach growl

With winter weather coming on strong, the idea of lining up for brunch in Kits doesn’t really appeal. And winter or not, I prefer to avoid line-ups when I’m hungry. I also tend to avoid places (no matter how good the food) whose staff exude misconceived superiority and shovel you in and out without so much as a smile.

So having ruled out The Naam, Sophie’s and Abigail’s Party; where else can we brunch in Kits?

Kitsilano brunch spot #1: Rocky Mountain Flatbread Co.

Rocky Mountain Flatbread only started doing brunch recently. The drive to open earlier and work longer hours came from a desire to serve great juice, which led to great muffins, fantastic omelettes and the inevitably awesome breakfast flatbreads.

This place is essentially two space combined into one by knocking down the adjoining wall. There’s plenty of space but it doesn’t ever feel cold and empty, thanks to the pizza oven in the middle of one of the rooms and the vibrant buzz of staff around it.

Food to awaken your tastebuds

Rocky Mountain is wonderful if you’re sick of the usual eggs Benny or two-sausages-and-hash-browns sort of brunch. To start, make sure you get a juice; I highly recommend the beet, carrot and apple juice. It sounds far too healthy to be tasty but the carrots and apples bring sweetness to the beet’s depth. From here, it’s a coin toss between the omelettes and the flatbread pizzas (i.e., bring a friend so you can share). The winner by a nose: the market flatbread.

As the name suggests, this pizza changes daily depending on what’s at the market; it has a freshness that eludes more engineered taste combinations.

Kitsilano brunch spot #2: The Sunset Grill

Feeling like an old English pub, Sunset is a favourite place to hunker down (and feel sorry for yourself) on a Sunday morning. Despite its small wooden patio out the front, inside offers plenty of room, with partition half-walls adding to the secluded feeling. The Sunset offers respite from chairs clicking on linoleum floors and the equally bad linoleum-acoustics. The sports on the TVs aren’t my favourite part of the brunch routine, but they provide a source of white noise that muffles neighbouring conversation, thus giving you some privacy and sparing you from any stories of how “he was like sooo gorgeous and I was like sooo whatever.”

Food to fill you up

Sunset offers healthy portions of traditional breakfast foods; huevos rancheros, buttermilk pancakes, etc. Unlike most brunch spots, the menu isn’t centred around eggs Benedict, try fulfilling your egg needs with their omelettes. I have never left here feeling underfed.

I also love that I don’t have to make the painstaking Sophie’s choice between bacon and sausages. I have both with the eponymous “Sunset Grill”: bacon, sausage, ham and two eggs, or the “Irish Breakfast”: bacon, sausage, eggs, homecut fries, grilled tom, mushrooms and toast (and no whiskey).

Kitsilano brunch spot #3: Aphrodite’s Café

I originally discovered Aphrodite’s when I was told that there was a great pie shop at Dunbar and 4^th. For a Kiwi, a pie means a delicious savoury pie with hunks of dubious meat and flaky pastry. So although I was at first disappointed to discover that Aphrodite’s pies were full of fruit, I wasn’t disappointed for long.

Aphrodite’s has since expanded their operation, and patrons from the café spill over to the tables in what I think of as a pie shop. The café has an old-fashioned corner café feel to it that seems to have grown organically (how fitting) rather than by design.

Food to ease your mind

Spearhead may be too strong a word, but Aphrodite’s have definitely been at the forefront of the organic and local food movements in Vancouver; so you can rest assured that your repast is as guilt- and carbon-free as they can make it. 

Last time I was there for brunch, I was blown away by my buffalo and blueberry sausages. From the brunch menu, I’d tend to steer towards the vegetable rich dishes, not because their Bennys aren’t fabulous (they are) but because the greens are in a class of their own. Don’t forget to buy a pie to take home. They even have gluten-free and vegan options.

But be warned: this place ain’t cheap; a kitchen that doesn’t scrimp on real ingredients means a higher price tag, but it also means higher quality.