Deetjen’s Breakfast Taste Test

May 4, 2021 – Something felt different. It took an hour or so of hiking around, exploring within, and generally admiring Deetjen’s Big Sur Inn to figure out what it was. 

It wasn’t the setting—not exactly, because it’s impossible to separate the place from your head space. 

As one guest announced after a look around Deetjen’s  dining room, “I came in 1977, and everything looks the exact same.” 

In other words, the place hasn’t changed, at least beyond getting back to its central identity. Rather it was the way the place helps reframe life itself. 

That included things that were both, once observed, a little sudden and a little subtle, but always a lot of vivid. 

The smell of redwood in the rooms. The sonorous songs of yellow warblers. The soft light through the stained glass. The colors of the lush ornamental flowers that drape themselves over the property: champagne primrose, wisteria, magnolia, camellia, agapanthus and echium among them.

It’s the absence of background noise—no TVs, no alert dings, no needy screens. It’s the rustic simplicity. It’s the attention to detail. It’s the soaring redwoods. Whatever the case, here, unencumbered by distraction, activated by nature, soothed by sounds of the relentless sea, senses sharpen. 

“It’s one of the most historic lodges on the entire coast,” says General Manager Matt Glazer, “and one of the last ones where you really deeply unplug.”

The elevated senses include the sense of taste, right on time for the return of breakfast service this week. Glazer and his team are fine-tuning the recipes to evoke the kitchen’s traditional expressions with precision, which inspired an Edible Monterey Bay visit for a taste test.

The flagship pancakes—thick and toothsome according to specs that will remain secret besides the influence of cinnamon, served with a big tab of pure butter and organic maple syrup—remain formidable. The thick-cut applewood bacon presents another staple. Combined with the curated relics of the dining space and some old South Coast personalities across the dining room, it all further encourages slowing down and communing with every bite and bit of local lore.

Still, the breakfast highlights lay elsewhere: namely, in the coffee and the eggs Benedict. The coffee, ground fresh for each pot, is dark, robust, lightly nutty, chocolatey and toasty—and, if you sit close enough to the dining room fireplace, able to work its own sensorial magic by weaving smoky flavors on the palate into wisps of white oak smoke from the fire.

The house Benedict, built from a recipe crafted when Jimmy Carter was in the White House, ratchets up the experience. Avocado, country ham, precisely poached egg and biscuit-like base all provide sturdy girders to build on, but it’s the hollandaise that harmonizes everything with its balance of soft spiciness and citrus spark. It’s somehow better than I remembered it being, and I remember it fondly. 

In preparing to visit, I had a conversation with Glazer in which he described visits as “life-changing experiences,” marked by sitting with old-fashioned pen and paper in an uninsulated redwood cabin. That sounded hyperbolic, but he’s playing his role as ambassador for an incomparable place, and I had yet to crack the book in my room.

Staying overnight for the first time, I lit a fire in the small stove, and started peeling through the pages of my Room 13’s journal while listening to my neighbors creak and out-gas through the thin walls.

The journal cradles stories ranging from tragic to triumphant, from a woman mourning the loss of her partner on the anniversary of his death surfing to a family’s youngest encountering the ghost of Helmuth Deetjen. And they often traversed both.

Here came another dimension of intensified awareness, not visual or audible or tactile, but emotional. And if putting down our devices and reclaiming connection with our senses, sensitivities, Mother Nature and fellow humans isn’t at least a tiny bit life-changing, I’m not sure what is.