Susan McKenna rolls up words with the kind of ease only an Australian accent can produce, tying together quick jumps of the tongue that sound through most of her tiny Nosh Café. She’s there most days (the place closes down when McKenna heads out of town) and her influence is obvious: The café cooks from the surest Australian origins.

Those Oceanian cues are clearest in the restaurant’s deli case, where there are meat pies and sausage rolls and all the typical takeout foods of Australia’s colonial heritage. The café’s imported tastes can be subtler, too, like the lightly curried chicken salad sandwich sweetened by a spread of mango chutney.

But not every detail here is one from Down Under. There are shelves stocked with wicker baskets fit for a country kitchen, windows lined with succulents dry enough for our coastal desert. Even an order of water is memorable here, sent to the table in a wine-sized bottle opened by an easy swing of its hinged rubber stopper. And all that adds up at Nosh Café: The place is so carefully crafted that it becomes impossible to forget.

What sticks strongest in the mind is Nosh’s long list of sandwiches. There are 16 regular recipes here and nearly every one is good enough for a repeat meal. Some stay satisfyingly simple (an excellent egg salad with shards of radish and a handful of greens, a surprising shrimp salad cooled with cucumber), while others build slightly more complex flavors. Regardless, the café’s roast beef sandwiches come out on top, the best of which piles on caramelized onions, horseradish and grain mustard. Despite the stark sharpness of the mustard and horseradish, this isn’t a spicy sandwich—the sweet rings of caramelized onions make sure of that.

Paired with the sandwiches is an ever-shifting selection of soups. A bowl of creamy carrot onion was ladled out on a recent visit, chunked with fresh flecks of carrot that, when eaten with the rest of the menu, help lead to the inevitable half-soup, half-sandwich orders. Nosh prepares some rotating sandwich and soup combinations for you, and that just builds into McKenna’s explanatory epithet written on each menu: “Fresh and delicious foods prepared and cooked with care and generosity. We use real ingredients to make simple seasonal café fare.”

Fitting into that simple, seasonal café concept is Nosh’s breakfast. There’s nothing quite square here (no scrambles, no pancake breakfasts), but those hearty American meals wouldn’t suit the restaurant’s easy-going ideology anyway. Instead, Nosh gets creative, serving a rice pudding with poached pears, a smoked salmon and goat cheese quesadilla and a crepe-like banana, Nutella and ricotta wrap.

But what fits finest into any stop at Nosh is a trip to that deli case. Everything under the glass can be eaten at the café itself, but most items do better packed up and taken home, serving as cheaper and better alternatives to similar offerings at so-called gourmet markets. The sausage rolls look like plain pigs in a blanket, but each doughy dog is a treat, the exterior falling away like the flakiest phyllo dough. Australian meat pies possess a more acquired flavor, but Nosh’s curry pies are universally accessible: peas and carrots and all the usual curry trappings baked into a hand-held hunk of that same delicate dough.

On the lighter side of the deli case are things like lentil salad and baked salmon with dill, but perhaps the single most satisfying is the sun-dried tomato quiche with goat cheese, a tender slice of a meal that best bridges Nosh’s breakfast and lunch.

For all its self-professed simplicity, Nosh Café is really a finely focused place. Recipes here aren’t folded together with any recklessness; at Nosh, every dish is refined to its core culinary pleasures. And that’s how the restaurant cooks up so many memorable details—even the most essential elements become something special, sights and scents and flavors that can’t help but dig down into your mind.

Tags: australian, deli, Food, nosh cafe, San Pedro