Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Namita Mehta offers a strawberry crêpe and a mushroom and Monterey Jack cheese crepe at the Crêperie.

French Crêperie appears in corner of Roasting Company

By Suzanne Cristallo

Namita Mehta has brought Brittany crêpes to Los Gatos. They are not the familiar dessert rolls Americans know here or have seen sold on the streets of Paris. They are meal size -- "plenty for one or enough for two," as the slogan goes. They can be ordered from a menu or filled with whatever customers invent for themselves.

Mehta's crêpe cart, specially designed by the French Michele Bloch, occupies a window corner of the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Co. She is an independent business, renting her space in the Roasting Company because she feels "coffee is a natural complement to crêpes."

Watching how the crêpes are made is part of the fun of eating them. Mehta pours a generous dollop of the batter containing unbleached white or whole wheat flour, eggs, milk and a pinch of salt and sugar on the center of the sizzling 16-inch crêpe irons.

Using a wooden paddle, she smears the batter in a circular motion so the entire surface of the iron is covered paper-thin.

Then the fillings are added: whipped eggs with cheese, tomatoes and onions, or vegetables and cheese, or broccoli, bean sprouts and peanut sauce, or corn and salsa, or whatever the customer dreams up. Dessert crêpes include fresh strawberries, chocolate, bananas, apples, pears, whipped cream and perhaps Grand Marnier.

The outer ends of the crêpe are then folded over the fillings to make a large square envelope bulging with a steaming meal for $3.50-$6.75 per crêpe.

It is appropriate for Mehta to introduce a French delicacy with fillings which represent the many villages, farm kitchens and country inns of Northwest France. After all, she is a composite of many nations.

Mehta is east Indian, speaking Gujarati and Hindi, but she never lived in India. She was born in Tanzania, near Lake Victoria, where the boat The African Queen met its demise. She is fluent in Swahili, English and some Japanese. The latter comes from living four years in Japan, where she taught school. She earned an education degree at Michigan State.

She met her husband, also Indian but born in Burma, in New York. They were married in India, she said, "because they felt they needed to do something Indian" and went to live in Singapore, where they reared their three children. They consider themselves "international citizens," to whom Los Gatos feels comfortable.

Los Gatos Crêperie, 101 W. Main St., Los Gatos. Breakfast, lunch and dinner served Tue.-Thu.,8 a.m.- 8 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 8 a.m.-9:30 p.m.; Sun., 9 a.m.-8 p.m.; Mon., 8 a.m.- 2 p.m. 354-3263.