Just a couple of years ago, Honolulu was nowheresville when it came to breakfast. It took a while for restaurateurs to learn that consumers have an insatiable appetite for eggs and pancakes, and Egghead Breakfast & Love is the latest to join the party.

The venue is a cute little 36-seat cafe that opened on the Kakaako site of I Love Country Cafe, which has moved to the Palama Shopping Center (more on that at a later date).

It’s nice of Egghead to add “love” to their offerings, but when you make that proclamation, you have to be prepared to deliver. I wasn’t feeling the love one morning when plumbing problems prevented them from opening, although they were inside working. It would have been lovely for them to offer us anything to assuage our disappointment.

What you will find are some terrific omelets and Benedicts, healthful greens, dessert-style pancakes and Taiwanese-style porky bowl ($7.50) and porky bao ($8.75). The fat quotient of the soy-braised pork belly is partially cut by pickled vegetables, but as popular as these dishes are in Taiwan, they’re less appealing to Americans with a love-hate relationship with fat. We’ll eat food when the fat is hidden but are leery of visible fat, and there’s a lot of it in both bowl and bao.

Another way the Taiwanese are different from you and me: They aren’t as addicted to sugar, and their fruit smoothies reflect this. Without sugar, fruit juice or other additives, the smoothies are actually healthful, but we’re so accustomed to drinks with added sugars that a mango smoothie ($4.75) and strawberry banana smoothie ($4.75) taste flat.

WEAKNESSES are forgiven with a bite of the fluffy omelets, their texture unrivaled by most in this town. I started with the chorizo omelette ($9.95). It doesn’t have a lot of the sausage in it, but the flavor is there. Other options include the California ($9.95) with its combination of avocado, bacon, onions, bell peppers, salsa and American cheese; shrimp and bacon ($12.95); Popeye ($9.50) with spinach, mushrooms, Swiss cheese and hollandaise; and Veggietopia ($9.95) featuring fried tofu, shiitake, spinach, bell peppers and provolone.

If you prefer a carb-based breakfast, these combos are also available in Benedict form, priced from $9.50 for a Mexican Benedict with chorizo, $10.25 for the California, to $14.95 for a crab Benedict. The classic with sliced ham and two poached eggs is $8.75. Both omelets and Benedicts are accompanied by your choice of Parmesan garlic toast, rice or salad of mixed greens.

Not to miss on the roster of sandwiches is the open-face avocado and scrambled egg combo ($7.95). On one piece of toasted Parmesan garlic toast is avocado spread with basil aioli dotted with corn kernels. On the other is the egg. Put the two halves together and you get squishy, savory magic.

There is also a lilikoi B.L.T. ($7.95), a bit faint on the lilikoi dressing, that still manages to liven up this classic.

The other menu stars are the pancakes. Choose the classic buttermilk ($8) or something simple like the banana pancakes ($9.25) if you’re there for a one-entree breakfast. The others can be reserved for dessert, as their names imply: strawberry shortcake ($10.50) dressed with house-made strawberry sauce and whipped cream; S’more ($11.25) with ganache, house-made marshmallow sauce and Graham crackers; or tiramisu ($11.95) with cocoa powder, shaved chocolate, espresso, whipped cream and tiramisu cream that made the pancakes taste more like vanilla pudding than tiramisu. There are also ube ($10.25) and macadamia nut ($10.50) selections.

Service has been good each time I’ve visited on a weekday, but another weekend outing was disastrous. After an hour’s wait in line, we waited a half-hour to get our order taken, and it took an hour for food to begin to arrive, piecemeal. I asked the owner what was up, and he said staffers simply didn’t show up.

Every customer in the house was complaining, and better communication could have averted the situation. If customers standing in line were informed of the staffing problem and slow service, we could have chosen to stay or go somewhere else. That’s simple courtesy. That’s the love.

BITE SIZE

Catering duo’s sushi bash spawns pop-up restaurant

When faced with a surplus of seafood last summer, the friends behind Rua Catering did what they know best. They threw a party.

Grant Oura and Jayse Sato’s backyard parties in Wailuku, Maui, drew friends, family and neighbors to sample nigiri sushi at $1 a piece. Those popular impromptu bashes soon turned into a pop-up at Vineyard Food Co. in Wailuku town, a space that serves as a commercial kitchen for a handful of small catering companies and food preparers.

With an eye toward testing restaurant feasibility in that space, the friends are now bringing their pop-up to the site from 5 to 10 p.m. every Friday and Saturday.

Sato, who worked in Seattle before returning home to work as a sushi chef at Nuka, still provides the sushi on the menu, while Oura tends to hot entrees that include an oxtail katsu and miso Buffalo wings. The two combine their efforts for a dish of pastele stew over a gandule rice and crab roll ($12), and lechon roll ($10).

Vineyard Food Co. is at 1951 E. Vineyard St., Wailuku. No reservations are taken. More photos are at honolulupulse.com/takeabite.

Nadine Kam’s restaurant reviews are conducted anonymously and paid for by the Star-Advertiser. Reach her at nkam@staradvertiser.com. “Bite Size” documents the new, the small, the unsung.