Café Campagne knocks it out of the park each weekend with oeufs en meurette: poached eggs on slices of brioche toast, blanketed with red wine and foie gras butter sauce, and accompanied by fries for good measure. At lunch, this kitchen does the standards really well: croque monsieur and madame, bacon and onion tarts, salade Niçoise. At dinner…well, you might as well go down the street to Le Pichet.

The space is cute, a reasonable impersonation of a French café, if one that panders a lot to the American expectations. (Think vintage French posters of the type that plaster the rooms of coeds who are too artsy and sophisticated to collect Absolut ads.)

Despite being so close to Pike Place Market, Café Campagne isn’t terribly touristy. Midweek, it’s infected with some of the market mania, but because the place is slightly tucked away, and just brusque and French enough to intimidate the cruise-ship crowd, it attracts the kind of tourists who are, at least, far more interesting to observe than the business lunchers that make up the rest of the crowd—aging European and Russian divas carrying giant metallic purses, for example. At least Seattle’s not provincial.