Good Eggs at Monsieur Egg Food Cart

On a recent Saturday morning, a stone's throw from the Silver Lake farmers market, passers-by stopped to take in the sight of a man in an apron adjusting the gas flame on the two burners of a small cart. A pile of freshly baked croissants sat waiting to be wrapped and handed out, while crab cakes sizzled in one pan and scrambled eggs dotted with smoked salmon cooked in another.

This one-man operation, run by Jaime Turrey, aka Monsieur Egg, will be at the at the LA Food Fest this Saturday, and will be coming to a downtown or Silver Lake street corner soon after.

L. William-Ross

Turrey, who hails from the Bay Area, got his start at the bottom of the hospitality food chain as a busboy. When he moved to L.A. a few years back he worked for the now-defunct Cook's Library; he says exploring food from the cerebral side was "an amazing experience [that] deepened my appreciation of food."

J. Turrey

For some time Turrey was the Executive Chef at Village Kitchen, a program that provided vocational training for homeless women, which is where the Monsieur Egg cart got its roots. Hoping initially to set up a sort of franchised cart sponsorship for the women with whom he worked, the idea eventually spun off into him running his own breakfast enterprise.

"Food, chefs, and butcher are the new rockstars," says Turrey. "Food porn! It's great--people are becoming much more aware of [food], boundaries are being pushed, and it's much more accessible."

Turrey gets his seafood from the California Fish Co. and his produce from the Echo Park and Silver Lake farmers' markets. And he's working on a partnership with a local butter-and-egg provider.

L. William-Ross

Scrambled Eggs with Smoked Salmon

Breakfast is of course what Monsieur Egg is all about. Scrambled eggs with a side of bacon or a crabcake for a more decadent day's start. He'll have coffee and fresh made pastries. Prices range from $3-7.

While Turrey hopes to pull his customers from people passing by, but he's also relying on the kind of word-of-mouth horsepower that Twitter (@MonsieurEgg) and Facebook provide.