Nathan’s breads are gorgeously unaffected, their floury surfaces white from the proofing baskets her pastries have a hard-won lightness, the sticky buns just the right amount of butter, nuts, and sugar. Hers is an approach that is as dependent on the romance of baking as it is on rigor. Huckleberry, a bakery and café the couple debuted in 2009, highlighted Nathan’s faux-innocent pastries. That was when Nathan was hired as pastry chef at Loeb’s new restaurant, Rustic Canyon (marriage came later), a place that slung a moneyed canyon vibe onto produce-driven cooking (with plenty of pricey bottles of Oregon pinot noir). Their talents first came together in 2006. Milo and Olive both fits into the trend and marks a watershed for Nathan and her husband, Josh Loeb, who oversees the business. Lunch, dinner-these are abstract junctures to a growing cadre of places (the Larder, Maison Giraud, and BLD come to mind) that can feed you mightily with nary a look at the clock. With a menu that’s unchanging from 11 a.m., when breakfast mode is shed, to 11 p.m, when the last pizza with Calabrian chiles goes out, Milo and Olive is one of those ventures that seeks to obliterate demarcations between meals. Over at the other marble-topped communal table, a bunch of women in good haircuts sporting all the shades of Eileen Fisher commemorate their get-together with cell phone pics. Two guys at the counter look like they gave up on the Kogi line. A teen who has appropriated his grandfather’s hopsack blazer savors the fried lemon wedge atop the calamari. A woman with a Saint John’s Health Center ID clipped to the lapel of her pantsuit tucks into a salad of Coleman Family Farms lettuces with squishy cubes of Hachiya persimmons. By high noon the atmosphere could be called a collision of sorts. That communal table where a guy happily reads Lopez and Plaschke over a cup of coffee and buttered toast will fill with a crowd here for chef Evan Funke’s rustic cooking and Zoe Nathan’s neotraditionalist baking. Adorned with thin slices of one of the organic pippins on display, it is a great way to begin the day. When an order for muesli comes in, a tall Tupperware container appears and a moist scoop is plopped into a cup. Meat is being fed into grinders for sausages. A young woman in a pink hairband peers into the wood-burning oven and tends to the embers. A cook weighs out pizza dough on a digital scale another checks a broad pot steaming on the stove. You can sit at one of the eight counter seats eating a bowl of stone-ground grits with sautéed chanterelles and an egg, sunny side up, feeling as if you’re part of the working crew.
In the morning, Milo and Olive is still calm.