Restaurants & Dining
Food Dude Eats at Crepe Creation Cafe in Myrtle Beach

In case you haven’t noticed, the Food Dude is prefers the kind of food you can eat with your fingers, but not finger food.

Foo-foo food, as I call it – tiny tofu, carrot and cucumber sandwiches with gooseberry vinaigrette. That’s for grazers, not carnivores. Give me a pig, a grill, a beer and a bib and I’ll be happy. Did I mention a beer?

So I couldn’t help but chuckle when I heard about Crepe Creation Cafe in Market Common. The name says it all – crepes, those skinny, little French pancakes, filled with all sorts of toppings. Maybe I’ll put on a beret and skirt and stop by one day, I thought.

Now fast forward a few weeks while I’m cruising through The Market Common looking for something open for breakfast … and there she was. This tiny little cafe didn’t look so intimidating. It might as well be a deli, I told myself as I walked inside and began to formulate a cover story. “Crepes? I thought the sign said Craps and I’m here to gamble.”

As it turned out, there was no need for an alibi. The Food Dude was greeted by an actual dude, owner and operator Larry Cauble. He’s a 20-year U.S. Army veteran and a lifelong lover of food, so we have that much in common. But I still prefer my pancakes the American way – thick and fluffy, dripping in melting butter and maple syrup and stacked, not folded.

Cauble, who spent three years of his life perfecting these paper-thin pastries and creating combinations of ingredients to fill them, is a dude’s dude. He quickly put me at ease and recommended the Western Morning Crepe, an omelet of egg, ham, bacon and cheddar, over the Stuffed French Toast Crepe. My new bud already knows my taste buds.

Cauble and his wife tinkered with recipes until narrowing it down to a nice selection of breakfast, “savory” (aka lunch or dinner), and desserts. With the goal of keeping every dish under $7, they successfully put together a menu in which everyone, even food dudes and foo-foo food dudettes, can find something in their wheelhouse.

There’s the Poulet Buffalo (seasoned chicken in Buffalo sauce topped with lettuce and bleu cheese) and Gyro (seasoned beef/lamb, feta cheese, onions, black olives and lettuce topped with lettuce and Tzatziki sauce) for the heartier eaters.

And there’s Champignons et Fromage (portobello mushrooms and brie with wild mushrooms and sage oil) and the Athens (fresh Spinach and feta or goat cheese with bruschetta salsa) for the fancier crowd. Crepe Creation also serves soups of the day and a not-so classic PB&J for the kids.

And the desserts – the Bananas Foster (melted butter and crystallized brown sugar with chunks of bananas and topped with caramel) and Blueberry Farm (fresh blueberries and blueberry compote and sweet cheese topped with whipped Cream and powdered sugar) – well, they’re for everyone.

Crepe Creation has been a quick hit since opening late last year. In fact, Cauble is considering relocation to a larger store in the Market Common district. Maybe I’ll stumble across it again, you know, on my way to the shooting range.