Blue Jeans Cafe

Eating at the Blue Jeans Café is exactly like what I myself experienced growing up on the farm, and I mean exactly.

Ma would get up at 3am to start fixing breakfast from scratch, making tender, flaky biscuits with gravy, piles of piping-hot pancakes, fresh sausage and thick slices of bacon, crisp hash browns, a selection of delicious pastries and gallons of hot coffee, and that was just to start with.

My brother and I would come downstairs, rubbing the sleep out of our eyes, and sit down to the kitchen table. “Howdy, boys,” Ma would say, “I’m whippin’ up omelets this morning. You want the mushroom and Brie with applewood-smoked bacon, or how about the chorizo and Gouda?” (Of course, Ma had trained at l’Ecole Des Arts Culinaires in Paris)

“Farm work is hungry-making work,” Ma used to say, and she wanted to make sure breakfast would stick to our ribs until lunchtime.

Okay, maybe my farm experience wasn’t typical, but neither is the Blue Jeans Café, open every day but Sunday for breakfast (starting at 7am so you can still get in a solid day of farm labor) and lunch. It’s a kind of crossroads, where down-home cookin’ meets highbrow cuisine - among the homemade soups, salads and sandwiches, you’ll discover gourmet options such as porcini mushroom and Brie burritos, or wild game sausage of elk or buffalo.

When they say “homemade,” these folks are not fooling around - everything, I mean absolutely everything, is made from scratch, and that includes the ketchup. I’m not joking, they seriously make their own ketchup.

This is also not your typical heavy, greasy, sit-in-your-stomach-like-a-rock type fare. As the Boise Weekly says, the Blue Jeans Café is “a flagship for the melding of old-school heaviness with new-school healthy,” owing to menu options like their amazing chicken wrap, or fresh-baked pastries that range from nonfat to low-carb to fully loaded.

In short, this charming little eatery is an Idaho original, and if you’ve never tried it (or even if you have) you’d be a fool to pass up this piping-hot deal.