Bread & Cheese (and smoothies) and Breakfast Burritos

A good number of restaurants — most even — switch their menus when breakfast time gives way to lunch hour. But I can’t recall any doing so with as playful a flourish as the multi-pronged storefront now called Bread & Cheese Eatery and And Breakfast Burritos.

PLACE

Bread & Cheese Eatery And Breakfast Burritos

1904 S Coast Hwy, UNIT 101, Oceanside

As advertised: when you show up at 10am, you’ll see a menu board mounted above the ordering counter, focused on breakfast burritos. Show up at noon, and the same menu board now offers variations on the classic grilled cheese sandwich. It’s if you happen to be there at 11:30, when flour tortillas are put away in favor of sourdough bread, that you may witness a demonstration of the nifty contraption the owners have installed, which allows them to slide the menu board out, and flip it around its axle to make the daily changeover official.

Breakfast burritos in the morning, grilled cheese from lunch on

As a brand, Bread & Cheese celebrates seven years in business this month. That is, it’s been seven years since childhood friends Devin Gneiting and Justin Frank launched the grilled cheese concept as a farmers market stand, later to turn up as a concessionaire inside a brewery, food hall, and performance venue. But as a South Oceanside eatery, the place has just gotten started. Despite a tiny footprint of only a few hundred square feet, the shop is now technically home to three distinct concepts.

And Breakfast burritos served hot and cold nitro coffee as well as nine burritos built around the same base of eggs, cheese, and garlic tater tots. Pineapple Crush serves a single tropical smoothie recipe. And Bread & Cheese Eatery serves what a series of custom-made cartoons contend is, “The World’s Best Grilled Cheese.”

A frame from a "Road Runner" inspired grilled cheese cartoon

The cartoons are fairly convincing. Gneiting and Frank commissioned several well-made animated shorts, all of which feature bread and cheese characters acting out familiar carton tropes, each in a distinctive style. An anime sequence sees the pair joining together as a grilled cheese mega-robot to do battle with a giant hunger zombie; while a Claymation pastiche depicts them becoming forever friends in a preschool setting. My favorite sets up a Road Runner and Wile E. Coyoted style chase sequence. It’s entertaining enough to view the sequences while awaiting your order, but you’ll find all the cartoons on the Bread & Cheese YouTube channel if you’re keen for a re-watch.

As far as the grilled cheeses themselves, I’m don’t plan to die on that “World’s Best” hill, but they are quite good, beginning with the cheddar and provolone “Classic” ($9.50). Golden, crunchy, and cheesy, the grilled cheese concept quickly gives way to melts: think turkey and sun-dried tomato ($13.50), salami and jalapeño relish ($12), and a Reuben-inspired melt featuring pastrami and sauerkraut ($13.50). And I’ve got to give these guys a thumbs up for including a better than you’d imagine vegan grilled cheese ($13). It doesn’t quite deliver the deep umami of actual cheese, but it could be the world’s best imitation of a grilled cheese.

A vegan grilled cheese sandwich

What I particularly like about Bread & Cheese etc., is that though these dudes clearly take their business seriously, they’ve injected a lot of fun into their work. Take the And Breakfast Burritos concept: breakfast burritos definitely make a fun option for surfers sliding in and out of South Oceanside chasing swells, or even commuters heading south. But the breakfast burritos ($9-16) are hardly run of the mill, as the tater tots are conscientiously cooked together with the eggs to keep one from overpowering the other. Then, they’re stuffed with many of the same items as the grilled cheeses (think pastrami, salami, and turkey, in addition to the usual bacon or sausage).

A pineapple smoothie, served inside a pineapple

Most fun, though, may be the Pineapple Crush smoothie, the pineapple blended with mango, banana, orange juice, coconut cream, and honey. In lieu of fruit options, you may choose a $9 smoothie served inside a cup, or a $12 smoothie, served within a hollowed-out pineapple. Call it yet another ingenious small detail that helps three exceedingly simple businesses punch above their weight in South Oceanside.