A five-course meal prepared with care awaits. Starting with a fresh fruit plate followed by cheese blintzes topped with berries, you then get to pick from 17 main entrees. The entrees offer a wide variety, certain to meet almost any appetite: savory souffles, three types of eggs benedict, frittatas, and gourmet raviolis highlight your choices, along with other contenders -- salads and pork schnitzels, for example. If you're feeling like something sweet, brie french toast awaits, with pecans, bananas and maple syrup. If you're hungrier than you'd like to admit, try the country ham omelet.

Run by owner Hans Afshar and his wife Hely, with the kitchen presided over by chef Jeff Dreamer, this veritable feast has delighted many over the past five years. The atmosphere in the restaurant is almost enough to charm you back again and again. Elegant tables, lots of dark wood, walls filled with wine and art, stained glass lighting, and generous windows all centered around a baby grand piano are matched by perfect service, unobtrusive yet attentive.

When I asked Hely about any favorites on the menu, she had to stop and think for a while before she answered with a small smile. "Every plate is picked up clean," she said, with more than a touch of pride.

Style abounds here. Get up and take a few steps and you can watch Jeff cooking, in chef's whites, in his open-air kitchen. Of course there's the excellent coffee and juice, but there are also some lovely surprises in store for those with a taste for a true leisurely brunch: Mimosas, Bellinis, Cosmos, Bloody Marys, and Arinis (champagne and cranberry juice). Pleasant jazz sets a background to match. Overflowing from window boxes are vibrant clumps of flowers, enough to cheer up a grey morning. Combined with the sounds of the music and the muted energy of the kitchen is laughter, a prime ingredient for any truly exceptional brunch.

For a change of pace from a greasy-spoon chain, you couldn't do better than to sit here and while away a few hours. This restaurant feels very much like what it is: a family place, but with the pleasant upscale note of a varied gourmet menu, and a relaxed, elegant atmosphere. Hans will change the menu, but he makes no certain schedule for it, just when they come up with something different they want to try or get a seasonal ingredient that they want to work with.  The menu may be slightly different when you give it a try, but the quality will not change, at least not while the Afshars are in charge.

Sometimes the smallest details can make all the difference. At one point, I stopped to contemplate my Danish, which they bring out with the fruit in the first course. This was not a pastry made without thought or effort. Hely moved through the room, smiling and asking how everything was. I added my voice to the murmurs of agreement rising up from the other customers.

Everything was just right, I thought.