Pretty Good Advice brings farm-to-table vegetarian cuisine to downtown Santa Cruz

Vegetarian café Pretty Good Advice opened a second location in downtown Santa Cruz on Feb. 1, bringing its seasonal menu of breakfast sandwiches, burgers, salads and soft serve to Pacific Avenue.

The opening was gleefully anticipated by fans of its Soquel location on Porter Street, which chef and owner Matt McNamara opened in 2018. The new location is open every day from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and joins a growing number of meat-free restaurants in the downtown corridor, including Mariposa Coffee, Veg on the Edge and Honey B Market. 

The downtown spot is nearly identical to the original location, with Pretty Good Advice’s trademark minimalist black-and-white decals of menu items and ingredients decorating the walls. The menu is the same, with eight egg- or tofu-based breakfast sandwiches; three burgers made with Pretty Good Advice’s house-made black bean patty; a couple of seasonal soups and salads; smaller breakfast items like coconut yogurt with local fruit; and fries, sides, vegan soft serve, drinks and a kids menu. 

It’s counter service only, and all of the meals are packaged to go, with limited seating inside the restaurant. There are three two-person tables and a small standing bar by the pickup window; a parklet is coming in the next few months. Diners essentially receive a fast-food restaurant experience and pricing – meals range from $5.50 for a grilled cheese sandwich to $11.50 for a kale and delicata squash salad – but made with creativity and bursting with color and fresh ingredients, many of which come from McNamara’s own farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Right now, that means winter citrus from McNamara’s orchards is woven into the menu, as the topping on overnight oats ($6.50), in the page mandarin lemonade ($4.75) and in an arugula salad ($11.50). His flock of more than 250 chickens also supplies eggs to his restaurants, and the apple chai is made from fruit from the farm. 

Before he founded Pretty Good Advice or started farming, McNamara worked in fine dining. He co-founded San Francisco restaurant Sons & Daughters, a Michelin-starred restaurant offering ingredient-driven cuisine, in 2010. Later, he purchased 83-acres of land in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where he now lives and farms 6 acres of specialty crops, orchards and animals. 

Pretty Good Advice aims to offer a great meal at an affordable price point. Breakfast sandwiches come on fluffy, toasted potato buns, with fried eggs boasting oozing, bright-yellow yolks, and stuffed with combinations of hash browns, mushrooms, cheese, avocado, vegetables and homemade spreads. The burgers are sloppy as all good fast-food burgers should be, and I always wash mine down with whatever seasonal flavor of lemonade is on the menu that week. Fans know to get the sweet potato fries just for the banana ketchup, a slightly paler cousin to Heinz that’s sweetened and thickened with banana. It sounds weird, but it’s perfect. 

Here’s some advice: Don’t skip the salads. They might be the sleeper on a menu filled with cheese, eggs, special sauce and soft serve, but they are bright and colorful, with thoughtful additions, like a peppery arugula salad with toasted hazelnuts, sweet roasted beets, mandarins and a zippy, floral yuzu vinaigrette. 

Although there’s no meat on the menu, McNamara is not vegan or vegetarian himself. Originally, he offered meat that he raised and slaughtered at his farm on the menu at the Soquel location, but decided he didn’t want to be a part of that process anymore. In the end, he chose to focus the menu on vegetarian items, and discovered he enjoyed the creative process of creating dynamic flavors without relying on animal products. 

“Everyone is surprised that I’m not vegan and I have a vegetarian place. I don’t think anyone that works for me is vegetarian or vegan, either,” says McNamara. “We’re just trying to make good food that everyone can eat.”

Pretty Good Advice has locations at 1319 Pacific Ave. in Santa Cruz and 3070 Porter St. in Soquel; prettygoodadvicesoquel.com.

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