Food & Drink
Review: À Demain Cafe Brings Fancy Toasts to Hampden
“You can put anything on toast,” says owner Christian Yoo of the beautiful open-faced sandwiches at his spot on the Avenue.
When you first enter À Demain Cafe, which opened on Hampden’s 36th Street restaurant row last July, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d wandered into an antique shop. There’s a gorgeous old Victrola by the door, a flowered settee, old-fashioned light fixtures and wall hangings, and gilded old mirrors with the shop’s menus painted on the glass.
Owner Christian Yoo will likely be stationed behind the counter, offering not curios but croffles and crookies—hybrid waffle-croissants and cookie- croissants—toasts, quiches, and croque monsieurs.
À Demain, which translates to “see you tomorrow” in French, is Yoo’s first business venture, and he runs the shop with his wife, Kelly. He credits the décor, he says one weekday morning in between making matcha lattes and cappuccinos, to Gott Efni, the Ellicott City florist that the couple used for their wedding.
It’s a charming location, though be warned that the only seating is on the front porch, which in the colder months sports a heating lamp and vinyl curtains. As for the menu, Yoo chose to highlight toasts because they were “very brunchy.”
“You can put anything on toast,” says Yoo, noting that they’re also pretty straightforward recipes, which seemed right for his first restaurant venture.
They’re also quite beautiful: open-faced sandwiches similar to Scandinavian smorrebrod that come in iterations of avocado-hummus, roasted tomato burrata, mushroom, honey-ricotta, and a lox version decorated with capers and pickled red onions. For the bread, they use excellent whole-grain slices, which are delivered daily from Lyon Bakery in Hyattsville.
In addition to the toasts, there are single-serving quiches, round pies the size of soup bowls that come in mushroom or bacon and cheese; tidy square croque monsieurs; croffle Benedicts—which is what you get when you press laminated dough in a waffle iron, then top the results with poached eggs and sauce—and, in a nod to Yoo’s Korean heritage, bulgogi melts. Should you want something with more bells and whistles than toasts, you can trick out your croffle with Nutella, strawberries, matcha, bananas, Oreos, or Biscoff.
With its rough-wood counter, plants trailing from shelving, and oversized floral pillows on that settee, À Demain is a very cozy place. And while the front porch can be a bit chilly at times, that giant heat lamp wards off the cold and extends the cozy vibes beyond the front door.
Though the crookies and croffles are cute, it’s the toasts that we’ll be coming back for. With their thick rustic bread and well-executed toppings, they’re an excellent alterna- tive to most breakfast offerings, and, yes, “very brunchy,” indeed.
À DEMAIN CAFE: 830 W. 36th Street, Hampden. HOURS: Tues.-Fri. 7:30 a.m.-4 p.m.; Sat. 8 a.m.-4 p.m. PRICES: Drinks: $3-6; toasts: $11 16; brunch items: $11-16. AMBIANCE: Antique shop.