Layers branches out with cafe offerings, but bakery fare still true indulgence

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This has to be heartening for restaurant owners everywhere: a business that started out very small (as a bakery) moves and branches out slightly larger (as a bakery and cafe) and manages to weather the recession.

The secret? Well, location can never be discounted, and the owners of Layers Bakery Cafe chose wisely, moving from a busy shopping center near a Trader Joe’s to a busy shopping center near a Target. But food quality is vitally important, and in that regard Layers certainly shines.

As you might expect, Layers’ bakery items are top-notch, and the menu has enough ladies-who-lunch offerings that you can play it light on the main event and save room for something sweeter, which I’d heartily recommend. (Or you can just do dessert first, if you really know how to live.) Two that we tried showed two different sides of the pastry-maker’s art, and both were exemplary examples. An eclair ($3.75) had a perfectly puffy pate a choux case enfolding a pile of rich, eggy custard, the top of it all enrobed with a thick layer of dark chocolate.

So that was a true indulgence, but so was a largish Linzer tart ($4.50), with its characteristically dense almond crust and slightly tart raspberry center. I’ll be honest here, either of them would have been fine for two people, but each was eaten by one.

But as I said, we tried to play it comparatively light with the main part of our lunches. The quichelike bacon and egg pie ($6.95) had a shatteringly crisp and oh-so-delicate phyllo crust, and an eggy custard filling that contained bacon and onion for sparks of flavor, a whole lot of spinach for earthiness and a blend of cheeses and jot of nutmeg for mellow notes. The wedge was just enough, but there was a slice of buttered house-baked crusty dilled bread on the side, just in case it wasn’t.

A different type of housemade bread — oatmeal-molasses, in this case — was the platform for the Wingnut ($7.95), a gussied-up chicken-salad sandwich. There were plenty of big chunks of chicken, plus almonds, red onion and romaine leaves for crunch, in a just-rich-enough mayo with a generous amount of dill. A tiny cup of shredded broccoli slaw on the side provided the right note of contrasting austerity.

Service throughout wasn’t much, because this is a bare-bones place when it comes to service — even compared to other counter-service restaurants. You order at the counter, get a number and sit down. When your number’s called you go up and get your food. It’s on real dishes, and real flatware is available, but you’ll have to pick up the latter, and a little sign on the table asks you to take it all to a busing station (screened off from view from the main room) when you’re done. But the employees at the counter were pleasant and efficient, and one wiped tables as soon as they were vacated.

The spare service is in keeping, I guess, with the coffee-house atmosphere, done up mostly in shades of citrus sherbet. There’s a banquette for semibooths plus some stand-alone tables, and a little lounge area off to one side. The prevailing scent in the air is butter; it’s hard to go wrong with that.

Or maybe the service and atmosphere are in keeping with Layers’ bakery origins, although there’s no take-a-number machine. If that’s the case, so be it, because those bakery origins are what make Layers’ food so special.

Las Vegas Review-Journal restaurant reviews are done anonymously at Review-Journal expense. Contact Heidi Knapp Rinella at 383-0474 or email her at hrinella@ reviewjournal.com.