Merritt's

Okay, I've been sitting on this one for a while because...well, because I just didn't feel motivated to do it.  But I'm trying to weed through my backlog of unfinished reviews, and I've had to delete so many because it's been so long that I just didn't remember them that well.  I just want to get caught up...

Treats and Tragedies on the Road: The Broken Yolk Cafe

We (the roommate and I) got off to a late start on our way back from the Oregon Coast, and neither of us were particularly hungry when we checked out of the hotel.  Subsequently we didn't stop for food until we stopped for gas, which happened to be about an hour down the road in Corvallis.  My original hope had been to hit Fishtails Cafe on our way out of Newport (those fried oysters, yum), but The Broken Yolk Cafe was a decent consolation prize.

Treats and Tragedies on the Road: Oregon Coast Weekend Day 2 (La Maison, Tillamook Creamery Cafe, Local Ocean Seafoods)

Deja freaking vu.  I spent two hours on this post the other day, and when I went to publish it my browser crashed.  Apparently whatever the glitch was that caused the crash was also preventing the auto-save from working, so the entire thing went *poof*.  I guess I could have started over right then when it was fresh in my mind, but I went and bought a bottle of gin instead.  So, this probably won't be as eloquent or verbose as the first time I wrote it since I'm feeling a little impatient at the moment, but then again it's going to be a long post anyway so maybe that's a good thing.  We now return you to my normal blathering.

I go out for breakfast less than any other meal, which is surprising when you consider how much I love breakfast foods.  Of course you can get them at places like IHOP or your friendly neighborhood truck stop all day and all night, but it's just not the same.  Unfortunately I'm just not a morning person...except on vacation, when I tend to rise with the Sun.  There was no debate about where we would be having breakfast; a mutual friend told us we NEEDED to go to a particular place.  That's how it was worded, "you guys need to go".  And I wasn't about to argue with her, because she's taller than me and would just bop me on the head.

Treats and Tragedies on the Road: Salt Lake City, Day 3

When I travel, I always have a loose itinerary of places I want to eat at.  However, I do understand that not everyone shares my tastes or will necessarily be in the mood for a particular thing when it's available, though I'm usually pretty good at getting my way.  That having been said, I always have one must-go place every time I travel, one that I insist on checking out above all others.  I had just such a place in mind for this trip, and on our last morning in Salt Lake City, I would finally make it there.

Memorial Day Weekend 2014: Day 3 - Newport, Tualatin, and back to Portland (Fishtails Cafe, Panera Bread, and more Voodoo Doughnut)

My alarm went off at 6 am.  Not exactly the most sensible thing for someone spending a single, relaxing night by the ocean, but I didn't know if the morning crowds were as bad as the evening ones at the local restaurants.  I love breakfast food, and don't go out for it anywhere near as often as I would like because, well, I loathe getting up early.  Yet here I was, doing it on my vacation, and all because someone on my Facebook page happened to mention an eatery that I had already been kind of interested in while I was griping about my disappointing dinner the previous night.

Welcome to South Beach...

A Night at The Ashley Inn

My roomie is a very spontaneous person.  Here's a perfect example:  last week when I was griping about wanting to get out of town, even if only for a day, she said that her kids were on spring break the following week, so if I wanted to take Monday off we could drive up to Cascade Sunday afternoon, spend the night, then grab lunch in McCall the next day.  After confirming that she wasn't joking, I figured why the hell not?  I got the OK from my boss, made sure I had some money that wasn't doing anything better, and it was all set.

Sometimes the past should remain just that...

Well, time to clear the inbox of a few more places I'm having trouble making myself write about.   Today's theme is "What the hell happened to these places I used to love?!"

A little end of the year housekeeping...

If you've read through my posts, you'll see quite a few write-ups for places that I thought were pretty good, a fair amount for places that I absolutely adored, and a few for places that I just plain despised.  That isn't to say that I don't go to eateries that I don't have any strong feelings about either way, or that I dislike just enough that I'm likely not to return, or that are just okay but I'll never go back because there are too many other eateries to choose from...it's just hard to work up the enthusiasm to write about them.  Eventually I accumulate enough of those places that I'll just combine them into one piece and get them off my to-do list.  This time I decided to compile a day's worth of meals as kind of a fun theme.  So, let's talk breakfast.

Royal Bakery & Cafe (CLOSED)

At the beginning of this month my employer moved our offices to Nampa, a place I haven't spent any serious time in since I was a kid and Karcher Mall was the epitome of local shopping.  In preparation for the move, I started researching eateries within a small radius of the new office.  I already had a list of almost a dozen when, a few days before the move, I accompanied my roommate to Nampa for a factory recall repair on her car.  I brought my own car along so we wouldn't be trapped in the dealership waiting room, and we decided to drive around and take a look at some of the places I'd been researching.  On our way back to the dealership, she suggested taking a quick detour through the little shopping complex around the Edwards theater across from the Idaho Center, and that's where we came across Royal Bakery & Cafe.  I pretty much fell instantly in love and decided that they would be my next review.  And yes, for those of you who pay attention to these things, they are the place that Boise Weekly wrote up this week.  The place has sat there for YEARS, and the Weekly publishes a review at the exact same time that I'm working on one?  What are the odds?!

I've mentioned this before, but I don't like posting a review of a place that someone else has just written up.  I may have visited a place three times in the last two weeks and be in the midst of my writing, when suddenly the Statesman or the Weekly publish a piece on it.  Maybe it's silly, maybe not, but it just sucks away my enthusiasm for it.  I don't want to come across like "I saw someone else's review, it made me want to try the place, and now here's MY review."  In these rare cases (there are few enough people writing about restaurants in the Valley that it doesn't happen that often), I usually just wait a couple of months before posting my write-up.  Still, I suppose it was only a matter of time before the luxury of that choice was taken away from me.  You see, the Weekly's piece on Royal Bakery ended with the information that the proprietor is considering closing down in a couple of months to focus on catering and studies so if I wait a couple of months I may very well be posting an "in memoriam" review.  I want them to be tempted to keep their doors open, and if I can lend to that by drawing some attention (and hopefully business) to them, then that's what I've gotta do.

Joe Momma's Breakfast (and Lunch) Eatery

I'm a big fan of aggregate review sites.  My favorite food-related one is Urbanspoon, and I will check reviews on Yelp on occasion, though I take them with a grain of salt.  The information I've found has been very beneficial, especially when researching places to eat while traveling.  However, they can steer you wrong on occasion.  People can be spiteful, and all it takes is one table with a little internet knowledge and an over-inflated sense of entitlement to skew a restaurant's rating.  If an eatery is relatively new and has only been rated by a handful of people, a group of three or four vindictive types can really impact a star or percentage rating.

When my roommate suggested Joe Momma's for breakfast one day, I shot her down pretty quickly.  The restaurant had a very good score on Yelp, but only due to a number of extremely negative reviews being "filtered" (translate: not counted against their overall score), and their Urbanspoon rating was, and still is, low.  Some time later, she finally ended up going with her father and came back determined to get me to try the place.  Now I don't always agree with this woman's tastes, but one of the few things we agree on is our love of breakfast.  So far we've seen eye to eye on every place we've gone to eat it, from our love of Goldy's to our outright hatred of The Griddle.  Needless to say, her insistence finally won me over.  As usual.

Goldy's Breakfast Bistro

It's just after 5:30 AM on a Saturday morning when I feel someone climb into my bed.  I turn over and force my eyes open to find myself face to face with my housemate, who is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as the saying goes.  I had slept about three and a half hours, getting to bed late after finishing another write-up.  I'm so out of it that I'm getting more of the concepts of what she's saying rather than the sentences as a whole, but she's definitely talking about going out to breakfast.  When I had finally hit the sheets around 2 AM, I had briefly considered waking her up and dragging her to Solid so I could finally try their chicken and waffles, since the kids were spending the night with their grandparents.  In the end, I had decided against it because she'd only been asleep for about five hours and I value my life more than a waffle, with or without chicken.  I decided on a different tactic: I would set my alarm for six, make a run downtown to DK Donuts for, among other things, their bacon maple bar.  I've been wanting to see how it compares to its daddy over at Voodoo Doughnut in Portland.  And now this.  I'm a little perturbed.  It's amazing how much difference another 30 minutes of sleep can make when you're that exhausted.  Then she mentions Goldy's, and suddenly I'm feeling much more awake.

Cracker Barrel

Breakfast food is pretty popular around our house.  In fact, one of the first things my girlfriend and I discovered we had in common was a love of breakfast food at pretty much any time of day.  I have my grandparents and all the late night truck stop runs they brought me along on to blame.  And as we all know, the only thing better than making a big platter of eggs, hashbrowns and bacon is having someone else do it.  That way you can eat it while it's hot without having to make the french toast that the kids want.  Cracker Barrel is a good place to be at times like this.

When  you need breakfast and a rocking chair to go...

The Egg Factory

If it's any indication how behind I am in my posts, my most recent visit to The Egg Factory was the same day I went to the Western Idaho Fair.  In fact, they were the reason I had so little appetite to sample all the deliciously horrifying fair food, so feel free to blame them for what a non-event that entry was.

What happened was that we had to be out of the house early because a crew was going to be installing new furnace and air conditioning equipment, so we had a couple of hours to kill before the fair opened.  The kids were hungry anyway, and my girlfriend suggested The Egg Factory.  We'd been there once before, but honestly I had been so tired that I couldn't really remember it, so it sounded like a good idea to me.