Bon Vivant Market & Cafe | Los Angeles

The sea beans should tip you off: Something is different at the new Bon Vivant Market & Café.

Served in a salad with asparagus or included in a sandwich with smoked duck, mint and arugula ($12), the beach-growing succulent adds a briny crunch to a number of dishes here. 

That the sandwich and deli-case salads drift toward the inventive is surprising, considering the rote cheese and charcuterie selections at this cavernous interpretation of a Dean & Deluca or a Balducci's.

With a coffee bar and baked goods of the high-end junk-food ilk, and such snacks as deviled eggs crossed with two shimmering anchovy fillets (pictured; $2.50 each), Bon Vivant can sustain you from morning to evening.

If that duck sandwich represents the creative end of the spectrum, perhaps overstepping a bit with its too-sweet green-tomato compote, the smoked-salmon sandwich ($12) is comparatively conservative. But that's not to say the safe choice is a bad one; stacked high with salmon and its familiar friends (dill, cream cheese and cucumbers), it is a great version of this sandwich standard.

Bon Vivant Market & Café, 3155 Glendale Blvd., Atwater Village; 323-284-8013 or bonvivantmarketcafe.com