The Ramos House Cafe

The Idea of the Ramos House is simple. Like the old days, the owner lives and works at the house. The wines are kept in the cellar, the herbs are grown in the garden, and the ice cream is turned out back. The menu changes daily, and everything is made from scratch. Welcome to my home.
-John Q

These words conjure up an older man; a former hippie who stormed the mall in anguished protest when the bombers flew over Hanoi, who joined the Peace Corps and fought for women’s rights in Sudan for 3 years. He lived on a commune in New Zealand, eating only Raw food “of the Earth” for a few years, and moved back to the U.S. to work at a Butterfly conservatory. This man learned he had a knack for cooking during his years helping out the chef at a Soup Kitchen. He wears beige Crocs, has kind, blue eyes feathered with soft lines, a short beard that's turning gray, and wants to backpack through Patagonia the next opportunity he has to take some time off. He rides a bicycle, with a basket that is commonly exploding with wild herbs just pulled from the garden, or daffodils that Ethel, his friend of many years at the local senior center, will adore.

Well, you would never match these words to the man who said them were he in a line-up. John Q has bleached spiky hair (dark roots never obscured), silver-rimmed teeth, and is generously tattooed. Just over 40 (I know this because I was at Ramos a couple of days before the bash and was able to coax some details out of his super-friendly, bandanna-wearing, restaurant crew, entourage, and best friends) John looks not a day over 29. He has warm round eyes, and almost always wears a black zip-up hoodie. Passionate about the Pogues, one who deeply mourned Kristy McColl’s untimely death, John will tell you jokes of a lonely man who loves Cheetos and goes to the Dr. about his unusually orange groin area while serving you apple beignets and mimosas, whether or not your Mom is sitting right next to you.

He'll fly to London for a concert that night and leave the next morning, go to Italy and fall in love with 18th Century Antiques, buy a crap load of them, and when they're shipped to San Juan Capistrano, realize he better do something with them. He begins drafting a business plan for one of the most talked-about wedding/party venues in Orange County; a (you guessed it) 18th Century Italian Ballroom space, complete with an industrial kitchen that while different from the home kitchen he's used to cooking in, I’m sure he’s itching to unleash on. He's a chain smoker made intensely nostalgic of his days in New York when I told him I was moving here. Where he told me I must go: Chumley's (RIP) and Angel's Share, watering holes that are both very telling of the man. Now that I live here, I can't imagine the havoc he wrecked on these streets; John Q is the 21st century Rocker's embodiment of Dionysus.

As eccentric, even intimidating as John sounds, the space he lives in, (the Ramos House) is comfort objectified, and the invitation that John extends for you to share his idiosyncratic, wicked, but magical and ethereal world is so genuine. This is a man who loves people; he loves to provoke them, to hear them, and to make himself heard, and over food, one's audience is captive.

This, the Ramos House, is where John Q lives:

The perfect balance of overgrown and well kept, this late19th Century house was, at one point in its journey, inhabited by a Ramos Family. The Mission San Juan Capistrano is less than the length of a block away (4 if you had to walk there), and the train tracks run right along side the seating area. The house, with the exception of the deck on the front (if you’re a favored patron) is not for seating. To the right though, just passed the host’s stand, is a space that seats about 40 under the canopy of a couple of umbrellas, and a few wise, beautiful trees from which ornaments and candle holders are strewn. Not immediately apparent, you see glimmers of them in the corners of your eyes. The chairs are wrought iron with slotted wood backs, the tables are mostly round, some wood, but most wrought iron, and look as though they were salvaged from the back yard of an old cottage on the coast of Oregon where they’d weathered the elements of a thrashing North Pacific ocean for years.

This place is magic. Ramos House is only open for breakfast, lunch, and brunch, and I’m sure that’s because when the sun goes down, the fairies and fireflies flutter about, gather, make love. I'm not talking about that pink, high-pitched Disney shit; I mean old fairies, the fairies of the pueblo (San Juan Capistrano was Mexico after all not too long ago), the fairies who were around when the Pacific, just a couple of miles away, was born; the fairies who weathered melancholy years when the mission and the horrid Catholic conquest sucked the life out of those same trees years ago. Here, now, under the shelter and majesty of the trees that shadow the Ramos House garden, they celebrate and they love, they make drum circles and dance with delirium before they pass out on tree branches, or in herb plots, drunk, happy, and well fed. The food of course, is magic too.

The brunch is two courses, $30 (recently down from $50 je ne sais pourqoi!) but worth $75. Your choice of a drink at first- a mimosa, champagne, fresh squeezed juice will be served to you in a jar. The choices of starters are several (caramelized citrus salad, basil cured salmon, corn fritters, coffee cake, soup etc) but this is irrelevant because I only (and you too, should only) ever order the Apple Beignets. The size of golf balls, the 4 beignets, dusted with powdered sugar and touches of cinnamon and nutmeg are incredible. Crispy on the outside, the inside is almost frothy- the dough light and airy, and the chunks of apple throughout ambrosial. They’re served on a milky caramel sauce, and are garnished with fresh bits of apple. While you're eating them, you wish they would never end, but when finished, you emerge quickly from faint disappointment to a state of perfect satisfaction; they're awesome.

And then comes your entrée. Your choices here are several too and while all are delicious and most certainly deserve your consideration, (some garnered my family members’ attention, you see below the mushroom, roasted garlic, and sun dried tomato scramble, deep fried poached eggs atop a beet and artichoke hash, the macaroni and cheese with tomatoes, green beans, garlic and lemon) I only ever order the southern fried chicken salad.


Three tenders of chicken breast, dreged in buttermilk and cornmeal before being deep fried, sit along side two corn bread fritters, and are then sprinkled generously with dried unsweetened cranberries and pumpkin seeds. This is topped with a buoyant mix of fresh baby greens, tossed lightly in a pumpkin seed vinaigrette, then drizzled with a buttermilk ranch dressing. So many textures converge on this dish. It would be satisfying eaten deconstructed: just the chicken- the crispy meal-y batter gives way to tender chicken that you would think is grown at back as well (it can’t be- if it is, John does a damn good job with noise control). The corn fritters: deep fried corn bread; what could be bad about this? They’re served as a starter in fact, on top of a fresh sweet pepper jam. A salad of fresh greens, dried cranberries, and pumpkin seeds dressed lightly in buttermilk dressing is sweet, savory, crunchy and soft. This salad is amazing- the components make a perfect whole. It's indulgent, yes, but amazingly unimposing once you’ve finished it.

Below is the bite I took of my brother’s deep-fried poached egg and as brief as my experience with this dish was (this bite, literally), the impression it left was quite lasting. A deep fried poached egg? Only John would do this: adulterate a perfectly good food only to learn that it’s potential, that of a poached egg in this case, hadn’t been even close to reached. The beet hash was lovely- sweet, but laced with onions and artichoke for balance and interest. There was a sauce too- a twist on hollandaise. I don’t remember what it was exactly, but it was great.

The whole dish for your viewing pleasure, is below. Plating at Ramos, you see, is an art. When the potential of the food has reached its maximum (or damn near close), its like sticking needles in the eye of a good chef to see the visual beauty of the food not exploited :


Below, my Mom’s mac n’ cheese. I didn’t try it, but its photo is beautiful enough to picture here without comment:

And the scramble: perfect. Served with a warm buttermilk biscuit and citrus marmalade, this is the consummate breakfast. Fresh wild mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers, and fluffy eggs piled high, this is the most ubiquitous of our entrees (if I can even call it that), and because we’ve all had variations of a this dish (and these ingredients) before, so so many times before, the craft and quality of this particular one, the thought “this is different, special,” is glaring.

As if all this isn’t good enough, the pottie is an out-house.

So you understand why San Juan Capistrano is the city where my heart is: because my family lives there, and because Ramos House, and all of its glory, is there too.