Black Bear Diner Review

The Black Bear Diner is part of a chain that spans a good chunk of the West Coast. Maybe 80 stores as of this writing, according to its website. We went for breakfast to check it out as it's of often fairly full (much more so than the Baker's Square it replaced)

Black Bear Diner food

 Well, Black Bear Diner pushes as one of its selling points a ton of food for your buck, and they're right. Here are two breakfasts. This is a generic eggs over easy, toast, hashbrowns, sausage combination. That's not exactly a small plate either. That sausage looks like it was dug out of a volcano.

Here's the South of the Border dish that I had which is an omelet with chorizo, salsa, tortilla (folded up a bunch in the foil), and avocado.

The menu at Black Bear Diner encourages you to bring the leftovers home which is good because it'd be bad for business for people to be explode after breakfast. Black Bear Diner is one of the few restaurants (and only diner) I know that has their nutritional information for their menu. This South of the Border omelet is about 1400 calories.

The Black Bear Diner menu pitches its made from scratch philosophy. But once you got past the IMAX-sized portion of food, the eating experience is underwhelming. My wife's sausage was ah...aggressively cooked. It came out a touch lukewarm. My omelet and chorizo were a little on the dry side. It's generic diner food, but I think you can do better elsewhere for breakfast in Napa. You'll get a lot more food at the Black Bear Diner at a lower price, but if you want something more out of your diner breakfast, there are a number of places probably better (Gilwoods Cafe, Buttercream Bakery, Emmy Lou's). If you want a more upscale breakfast, there's ABC Bakery and the Boon Fly Cafe.  

Black Bear Diner setting and service

 Service was fine, but it took a surprisingly long to get two fairly simple dishes out to us. Part of the reason for that might be just the crowd of customers swamping the  kitchen. When we went for breakfast at 9:00 am, they were out of biscuits which was a bit head-shaking because it's supposedly one of their hallmark foods and it shows some bad planning. As for the setting, well, I hope you like black bears as they are everywhere. On the table, walls, menu, statues, figurines, newspaper, placemat story, etc. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it already.

Price of our meal 

 2 breakfasts + 1 coffee + tax/tip = $25

Of course, we got two meals out of it as we could only eat half before bringing the rest home; so it's actually cheaper than this.

The Black Bear Diner can be quite full at times. Its large portions for low prices really strike a chord with a good chunk of the local populace. The food isn't great, and I'd rather eat at a number of other places, but then again, we make enough money where the quantity of food isn't the overriding factor.

Other Black Bear Diner reviews and links

•  Yelpers' reviews'
• Frommer's description (for the Sonoma location, but I doubt it's different than the Napa one)