HotelChatter

Breakfast starts at 6:30am during the week, and 7:00am on the weekends. The egg dishes come in your standard variations like huevos rancheros, and two eggs any style, but also in more interesting iterations like poached eggs with Serrano ham on a croissant, and in an artichoke tart with spinach, applewood bacon and ricotta cheese. Or suck on a smoothie while waiting for your lemon griddle cakes with vanilla bean syrup to arrive.

The lunch and dinner menu is served until 10:30pm every night. The starters include a Cali-Mex roasted corn tortilla soup with cojito cheese, hamachi and crab carpaccio with toasted almonds and citrus, and crispy-creamy gnocchi with prosciutto, ricotta and rocket lettuce. In addition to small pizzette and meal-sized salads like one with calamari, edamame and Napa cabbage in miso dressing, there are a few seasonal, market-fresh entrees like a light chicken paillard in brown butter sage sauce, a burrito by way of Arabia with Wagyu skirt steak, nopales and avocado wrapped in a chickpea-scallion crepe, and a dish of juicy cuts of Pacific black cod in a sake-miso marinade. For dessert, the apple crisp is thin and golden brown, while the blueberry cheesecake is creamy and rich (though there are stealthy cilantro shoots on top that sort of skew the flavor).

Though the small wine list has some excellent California producers, and the specialty cocktails like the Ruby Red “Sunset with vodka, St. Germain, grapefruit and lime juice are tasty, our favorite features of the restaurant definitely had to be the pink and turquoise embossed leather chairs and booths, and the fantastical plush wallpaper depicting monkeys playfully running amok in the kitchen.

With a casual vibe, a professional lunchtime crowd, and a menu of fresh California produce and meats, maybe Boxwood will finally make this “Kitchen Nightmare” popular.