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The Japanese-style sandwiches at Berkeley’s five-month-old Eloise would impress Euclid himself with their geometric precision. Sliced laterally and presented with bright and colorful fillings, sauces, and seasonings facing you like a wide grin, their visual appeal is surpassed only by the delirious combos of flavors and textures. In the tamago sando, for example, a soy-marinated egg is swaddled in Kewpie-mayo-rich egg salad and slices of founder Oliver Finkel’s cloudlike shokupan bread, perfected over the past decade at his City Park bakery, Good Bread. The tawny egg halves stare back at you with sunny yolks cooked to a jammy consistency.
Meanwhile, Finkel’s braised pork belly sandwich bursts with crunchy layers of purple cabbage slaw and lettuce, jalapeño matchsticks, and a sprinkling of red chile and Sichuan peppercorns. “It seems so pedestrian to make white bread sandwiches, but there’s really a lot to it,” says Finkel, whose team scours local farms for seasonal produce and dreams up menu specials such as sausage sandwiches built on brioche buns using artisan links from Denver’s Lottie’s Meats.
The only thing pedestrian about Eloise is the number of people hotfooting it through the neighborhood to nab a place in line outside the petite sun-drenched cafe. 4315 Tennyson St., Denver (Berkeley)
