Main Kitchen Café, 8one8 Brewing play nicely together in Canoga Park

Spend enough time driving around this Rubik’s Cube of a city, and it’s hard to keep an endless sense of perversity from filtering into your heart and mind.

I’m not just referring to the perversity of trying to negotiate our traffic — which can turn into a war zone at any hour of the day or night — but also the bizarre point and counterpoint of business locations. One of my favorite examples of this is the adjacent situation of a ritual Orthodox Jewish mikvah bath…next-door to a massage parlor of dubious intent in West LA. Purification and shame sit cheek to jowl. As it were.

Thanks to our multitude of mini-malls, perversity is everywhere. And in the case of the De Soto Plaza on De Soto Avenue in Canoga Park, we have the sedate, Middle American cooking of Main Kitchen Café…just a few steps from the raucous happy madness of the tasting room at 8one8 Brewing. You can have a kale chicken Caesar salad in the first case, followed by a hot open-faced turkey sandwich. After which you can knock back a Valley Girl Blonde Ale, and a Reseda Rye IPA, accompanied by food from whatever food truck has parked in front.

The two worlds are not in collision, but in comfortable adjacency. They make for a very happy evening.

Canoga Park’s Main Kitchen Café (De Soto Plaza, 8901 De Soto Ave., Canoga Park, 818-280-3033; also, 17013 Chatsworth St., Granada Hills, 747-300-2433; www.mainkitchencafe.com) is a branch of the original in Granada Hills. This is not a pair of restaurants that tries for trendiness — though being in the SF Valley probably makes it trendy to the much of Middle America, where pulled-pork lettuce wraps and soy-ginger salmon with sticky rice are not standard operating procedure.

Nor, for that matter, is the very satisfying breakfast menu — a greatest hits collection of how we like to start the day hereabouts. There’s avocado toast made on multigrain bread, with a salad of arugula and quinoa. (To which you can add an egg, bacon, ham, sausage, chicken turkey or smoked salmon, making for a hefty slab o’ toast!) There’s a breakfast pizza with chicken apple sausage, a trio of Benedicts and, of course, a section of dishes “Made with Tortillas” — two breakfast burritos, chilaquiles and huevos rancheros.

And of course, there are plenty of classics as well — omelettes and scrambles, French toast (four ways), steak and eggs. The style of the breakfast menu — a mix of old and new — flows into the lunch and dinner menu. Everything from a “Jive Turkey Pesto Panini,” an Impossible burger and a vegan wrap on the one end…to Buffalo wings, a hot open-faced turkey sandwich, a grilled flank steak and a roasted barbecue half-chicken plate on the other.

And it was the roasted chicken I was eating one evening, seated at the counter, when I decided I really was in the need of a beer a few steps away at 8one8. The portion of chicken was large, a bit overcooked but tasty under the barbecue sauce, with massive side of hyper-crispy waffle fries, and a big cup of juicy coleslaw — a lot of food for $16.

The thing is, there are big screens all over the Main Kitchen Café. And on this evening, none of them was showing the Dodger game. They were playing the SF Giants, so it was a big game. And since I’m a fan, the game called out to me. (What was on the screen in front of me was a rerun of a Julia Child cooking show. She was cooking some salmon with Jacques Pepin. Tasty, I’m sure. But I needed a Dodger Dog for dessert. Or at least a crafty beer. And so, it was down the mini-mall lot for me, to the tasting room at 8one8 Brewing (8953 De Soto Ave., Canoga Park; 818-208-0648, www.818brewing.com).

It was packed with rowdy locals waving beers, big screens showing the game and dogs — lots of dogs. There’s a sign at the entrance that informs: “We’re dog friendly IF your dog is friendly!” (It also tells us that “We don’t serve Corona, so don’t talk about it!” and “Our beer goes best without the discussion of religion and politics!”)

In front of the Brewery, there was a taco and burrito truck called Mexcla. And on the wall, there was a list of beers that ran close to 50 — only a few of which are brewed in-house. But then, with a great game on, an affable crowd, plenty of well-behaved hounds, and huaraches and gorditas on the menu, a Matador Red Ale, a Cat in the Hat Stout and a Bag of Hops IPA all taste good.

I went from Julia and Jacques, to Albert Pujols, Kenley Jansen and Justin Turner in just a few steps. I went from chocolate fudge brownies to Gravity Hills Tripel with a few steps. It was both perverse — and it made for a fine evening.

Next time, I’ll add on some bowling with the buds. Which would be beyond perfect.

Merrill Shindler is a Los Angeles-based freelance dining critic. Email [email protected].