on the weekends, i love love love going out to breakfast. there’s nothing like waking up with a long, lazy day stretched out ahead and shuffling down to a local eatery for a relaxing meal in the sun. this past weekend, due to the fires, the husband and i decided to spend sunday on the west side, to get away from the thick haze of smoke and ash. we found ourselves at the culver city m café for the first time.

while the melrose location is often packed and unpleasant, the culver city spot had a healthy crowd, but there were still plenty of comfortable places to sit. it’s much bigger than the melrose m café, and the clientele are all around less douchey. the culver city m café still serves up the same great food, though, as its sister location. this was my first time ever trying an m café breakfast, and it was even better than all my other favorite items on their huge and delicious menu.

vegan benedict: grilled whole-grain baguette steamed kale, tomato, tempeh bacon with soy hollandaise. $10.25

the vegan benedict at this place was not to be believed. being the breakfast-lover that i am, i hold my meals to very high standards, and i can safely say that this was perfect. most breakfast serving restaurants in this town have their own vegan version of eggs benedict, and i’m makin’ it my mission to try them all. m’s is sooooo good though, i don’t see how it can possibly be beat. it pwns the worthy opponents over at flore and follow your heart.

what makes this benedict so great isn’t the fresh kale, the smokey tempeh bacon, the fluffy tofu scramble or the crispy bread. uh uh. it’s the creamy and rich eggless hollandaise sauce. i don’t know how they make it, but it’s so tangy and full of flavor. it has a pretty strong mustard taste, but in a very good way. it mixes so well with the light tofu and completely penetrates the slices of grilled bread. this sauce gets all over everything and makes the whole plate tasty.

so as you can tell, i can’t speak highly enough about this vegan benedict. it made a leisurely weekend breakfast the highlight of the day. i’d like to try all the other crap on m cafe’s breakfast menu, but i don’t think i will be able to resist ordering the vegan benedict every time.

so check out the m café culver city outlet if you haven’t already. it’s about 3 times the size of the melrose location, and a lot nicer. plus, you can park for free for 2 hours at the trader joe’s complex right across the street. and most importantly, it has GREAT FOOD!

follow your heart never ceases to amaze me. they are this awesome entirely vegetarian health food supermarket attached to a kick-ass vegetarian cafe, where almost any dish can be made vegan. the more i shop there, the more i realize how freaking special it is. i mean, it’s been around since 1970, which means they must be doing something right. then they go ahead and offer one of the most extensive, mouth-watering menus in the land. and everything i’ve eaten in their cafe is amazing. sunday’s breakfast was no different. a slice of vegan perfection, indeed…except for one thing. a quarrygirl pet peeve, un-advertized ingredients arrived on my plate. in this case, it was bell peppers (which i despise) sneaking into my side of breakfast potatoes. grrrr.

tofu benedict breakfast special: poached tofu and tomato on a toasted english muffin, smothered in an eggless hollandaise sauce. served with breakfast potatoes, soyrizo, scrambled tofu & spinach. $11.95

despite the bell peppers, this mini-feast was absolutely wonderful! i had really high standards for a tofu benedict, after trying flore’s variation, but i can definitely say that follow your heart brought their A game with this one. the little tofu cutlets were topped with thick, fresh slices of tomato, slathered in the creamiest sauce and topped with slightly cooked leaves of spinach. as if that wasn’t enough, there was a clump of breakfast style scrambled tofu on the side and a mound of perfectly seasoned soyrizo. of course the first thing i did after snapping these photos was cover the whole plate in brother bru-bru’s, the insanely spicy african hot sauce supplied at the cafe. 

i think i am in love with tofu benedicts. vegan hollandaise sauce is some of the most rich and sinful stuff i’ve ever eaten, a perfect compliment to all the fresh vegetables and the modest slices of tofu. the tofu just needs to be heated, not cooked elaborately or even seasoned. once the sauce is poured on, it infiltrates and turns the tofu into a tasty little protein sponge. it doesn’t stop there either, it oozes down and gets totally soaked up by the porous english muffin as well. i’m telling you, this sauce improves everything it touches. thankfully, they basically drown the plate in it, so there was enough hollandaise to scoop on top of the scrambled tofu and soyrizo as well.

luckily, the bell peppers were confined to a small section of the plate. while it could have been a lot worse, unfortunately the whole side of breakfast potatoes had to be quarantined.

so there ya have it, another awesome breakfast at follow your heart. i’ll give it an overall A-, points were deducted for unadvertised ingredients. if you hate any food, you should check to make sure it won’t be arriving on your plate. (the burger also comes with unadvertised pickles!)

definitely a favorite sunday breakfast spot, so i’m sure you’ll be reading about again sometime soon. and i really gotta try out their lunch and dinner menu as well! oh and when you check out the cafe, don’t forget to fill an entire cart with vegan groceries from their market on your way out.