Who’s going to skip the most important meal of the day when it’s not only easier to find, but also sharing a menu with burgers? John Pol and his family, longtime proprietors of A Good Morning in Los Altos, brought some of their morning mojo east and opened The Griddle. Since the beginning of October, Pol and chef Hugo Montano have been serving breakfast as well as classic and fusion burgers at the Santa Clara eatery.

SanJose.com: You already own a breakfast/lunch offering in Los Altos, what made you want to start The Griddle?

Pol: I’m from the Midwest, Cincinnati, and when I moved out here about five years ago there were no real American breakfast places, especially in Santa Clara. They’re all just chains and small cafes but they weren’t what I was used to in the Midwest. A lot of our recipes are like what you’d find in a Midwest or East Coast diner. I used to be in the tech industry, so I used to eat around here for lunch and breakfast. There’s coffee shops, but there’s no breakfast. There was Vietnamese, Indian, which I love, I like the different cultures and cuisines, but there was just no American.

For those who have eaten at A Good Morning, are you different? The same? How do you compare to your sister restaurant?

A Good Morning has a bigger menu, the market is a little different, the clientele is a little different, its more of a breakfast-lunch place. We have a little more emphasis on burgers here, we just happen to be a breakfast place too.

So the burgers are more of your focus here?

Right. We offer traditional burgers, but we work with the chef to make fusion burgers too. We have Banh Mi burger which is like a Vietnamese burger. There’s some with a Mexican influence. Just some unique ones that you wouldn’t be able to get from other restaurants.

Besides the fusion burgers, how do you think you are different than other breakfast or burger joints?

For one, we don’t even have a freezer here. Some restaurants, they keep a lot of stuff around, but a lot of it is frozen. We don’t freeze anything. We do everything house-made here. Our onion rings are fresh battered, our fried-chicken is battered here, everything is our own marinades. The local farmers market is where we get all our fruit and vegetables from. We also have vegan offerings, which is unusual for a burger place.

Diners can be funny like that at times, as far as freezing things and not having the freshest food.

Yeah, we’d rather keep it smaller and keep everything fresh. I’m used to the places in the Midwest that are more like a farm, they have a rustic feel. And a lot of burger places are very industrial. We want it to feel more like home.