Breakfast takes center stage at Gracia Krakauer’s Red Apple Cafe
Before they moved to Aptos, Gracia and her husband Dan Krakauer would visit friends in Santa Cruz County and eat at the Red Apple Café all the time. Then they moved up here from Santa Monica five years ago, and bought the Aptos location (there’s a separate one in Watsonville) from the family who owned it for two decades.
GOOD TIMES: What’s your favorite color apple?
GRACIA KRAKAUER: Golden delicious. Red would probably be my second, and green with peanut butter. Better if it’s dipped in chocolate. That’s how I come up with the specials—what I think I want to eat when I come to a restaurant. Bacon and cheddar pancakes!
Are those a regular item?
They are a special we came up with two years ago. It comes on and off our special board. Everyone wants us to put it on the menu, but if you ask them what item we should take off in order to fit it all on there, they’ll say “Oh, you can’t take anything off.” That’s why we rotate it. But it’s very popular. The sweet with the bacon and the cheese is really good.
What should I put on my pancake?
Our pancakes are really good without anything. But we have maple syrup and we have whipped butter. You don’t need anything more. They stand on their own.
Do you like Mexican food? The “South of Border” menu section has many exclamation points.
Yes, when we go out to dinner, it’s one of three places, and one of them is always going to be the Mexican food restaurant that we love.
Which one?
Tortilla Flats. It’s one of the best in the town, and it feels like us—it’s homey. I know everyone there. They know me by name, probably because I go there so often.
Is this the biggest breakfast menu of all time?
It’s the biggest one I’ve seen. And then we’re also known for our homemade hollandaise sauce that we make fresh every day, so we have eight or nine varieties of eggs Benedict styles—like the Neptune or the blackened salmon or the shrimp and avocado.
