What's Good

Artful charcuterie boards spilling over with brie and fruit are the ephemeral mandalas of the food world. Brie and berry jam show up together on fancy grilled cheese and burger menus all the time. And you can't shimmy a buckwheat crepe out of a pan without someone tossing a slab of brie onto it. So why has it taken so long for brie to show up in my pancakes? I speak here in terms of both the breadth of history and my own flapjack-consuming career, which is long and storied.


At Wildflower Café (1604 G St., Arcata), you can order brie and blueberry pancakes and join in my forehead slapping ($10.50). The yellow cakes, bubbly and browned, have hunks of brie, rind and all, folded into the batter with whole blueberries. Of course there are savory, melted bits working their rich charm against the berries and the syrup — real maple, bless them — and here and there at the edges are dark, crispy sun flares of cheese that have made contact with the griddle. Picking them off and dragging them through the pooling syrup may be what you've been missing all this time.