Photo by Frank McMains
It is rare for an unassuming, local start-up restaurant to receive so much positive, word-of-mouth buzz, but that has been the case with Magpie Café on Perkins Road. Happily, the culinary scuttlebutt is warranted. This erstwhile hair salon and tattoo parlor nestled in the popular “Overpass District” manages to be austere and contemporary without feeling sterile. They are also serving up straightforward, unpretentious fare that is fresh, well-balanced and pleasantly presented.
On a recent lunchtime visit, a friend and I each got one of the two daily specials and shared them between us. Offered this particular day, was a garbanzo bean sandwich with a subtle lacing of dill and a barbequed chicken sandwich with blue cheese. The latter could have been a risky mess reminiscent of an ill-considered visit to Hooters, but the people at the Magpie seem to know a lot about restraint and letting good ingredients define a dish rather than bludgeon you with their potency. Both sandwiches were warmed and grilled in a panini press on dense, substantial bread.
The Magpie Café also offers a complete coffee and tea bar. There appeared to be as many people enjoying Wi-Fi and a mid-day jolt of caffeine as there were diners. This was just as well for my companion and me as the Magpie only prepares a limited number of entrée specials each day. Once they are out, they are out. There is no scuttling to the deep-freeze to revivify some article of food that has lingered overlong in cold storage. The Magpie sources many if not most of their ingredients locally. While they prepare a generous number of servings each day, they are practicing a style of cooking that relies heavily on seasonal and fresh product and once it is gone, you will just have to remember to show up earlier the next day.
Many a Baton Rouge food enthusiast has seen the rise in quirky, fresh-focused restaurants in other towns and bemoaned our also-ran status in the foot race of food trends. However, this position is slowly improving with the opening of places like the Magpie Café. In fact, this somewhat cramped and narrow stretch of Perkins Road has long been a haven for locally run eateries with small outfits like Pinetta’s, Rama, DiGiulio Brothers and more recent transplants like Chelsea’s Café long being beloved eateries. Jimmy John’s is the obvious chain restaurant exception in this stretch, but two lane roads with confusing intersections and rumbling overpasses are an ideal, if at first surprising, breeding ground for local business. Chain restaurants, by and large, want titanic seas of parking and swaths of shimmering new concrete to ensure their business model. While local start-up eateries and their curious patrons are generally happy to sniff out the new, novel and noteworthy in older, less plastic parts of town.
In both the realms of food and design, the Magpie Café seems to be every bit the labor of love. Without a commitment to some ideal or vision for how a place wants to be, many small restaurants can suffer. But, the Magpie seems to be doing a brisk trade even if their model is somewhat outside of the typical, Baton Rouge norms (or perhaps exactly because it is outside of those conventions). My dining companion gleefully reported that many of the ingredients we were eating were bought at the Red Stick Farmer’s Market or from the farmers that have made that Saturday institution so successful. She described other meals she had eaten there and their practice of demanding fresh ingredients with the sort of personal pride that leads to the organic, untempered passion for a place that so many restaurants crave.
The owners of the Magpie Café have staked their claim on a particular view of how food should be prepared and served and it has lit a fire in the foodie rumor mill. I would not even want to hazard a guess as to how many times I have heard it mentioned in warm and endearing terms. This is the sort of buy-in that small shops need to thrive and only comes when the authentic, passionate execution of a dream coincides with the desires of a hungry public.
Be sure to check their website and the usual social media outlets for their regularly changing menu. Enjoy a beautifully frothed cappuccino in the morning or light, exceptional panini in the afternoon, but be sure to visit because with the current level of enthusiasm over the Magpie, you very soon might not be able to get a table. Oh, and please bus your own table, the staff is busy making amazing food.
Details. Details. Details.
Magpie Café
3205 Perkins Road
Baton Rouge, La.
7 am–5 pm Monday—Friday
8 am–5 pm Saturday
