Skip to main contentThe past few years of Portland history will probably be remembered as a period of reinvention. On the west side, major new districts rise from scratch. Inner-eastside neighborhoods--the suburbs of a century ago--are revitalizing and being redefined. Astro-age streetcars slide down streets platted in 1865, while hardhats hack out new railroads to points north.
It's a lot for the armchair urbanist to take in. Conveniently, two new cafes offer dramatic--and dramatically different--vantages for contemplating the civic flux while sopping up caffeine.
The Gotham Building Coffee Shop's most immediately striking asset is the view at the junction of Interstate and Albina. Behold the guts of Portland trade, transport and industry. The Fremont, Broadway and Steel bridges, the Port's loading docks and seagoing ships, clanking train yards, dour grain silos, Tri-Met buses rumbling past on Interstate, moldering brick warehouses--all in a frantic scene straight out of a futurist wet dream. You can also spy construction cranes swinging over the Pearl District, downtown skyscrapers, Forest Park, the West Hills. Add the crews hammering on the new Interstate light-rail line about 10 yards from the Gotham's front door, and you have a spectacle that could flat wear you out. Fortunately, it is as serene within the Gotham as it is chaotic without.
Michael Hebb and Naomi Pomeroy made their culinary bones through their catering service, Ripe, and a series of quasi-private banquets in their home and a back-alley kitchen/dining space stashed near the Gotham. The Coffee Shop provides the general public a chance to check out their food on a regular basis, and its physical attributes complement their simple but oh-so-ass-kicking cooking. The cafe's interior, an airy space anchored by rough-hewn wooden structural beams, is spare without being austere. Likewise, meals from the Gotham's menu are exactingly concise in conception and presentation, but generous to the tongue.
Breakfast at the Gotham is a high-calorie and sort of old-school affair; we're not talking innovation here, we're talking execution. A fried-egg sandwich ($5) topped with a slab of bacon, served on an onion roll and paired with a dose of Illy coffee, is pure high-test fuel to start the day. Granola, maybe the least interesting breakfast to think about, comes studded with lush berries and pecans the size of Ping-Pong balls.
Lunch, likewise, sees sleepy standards awakened with spruce selection and culinary bravado. The title meat of the ham sanny ($6) is cured in-house, and that chicken, my friends, grew up on the open range. A recent day's lunch special paired pork and poultry in a saltimbocca sandwich that lived up to the Italian meaning of its name--it was, true to Ripe/Gotham form, a jump in the mouth.
The Gotham's look may be cool and relaxed, but the kitchen equals the dynamism just outside its door. Meanwhile, the Back to Back Cafe's menu doesn't fly as high, but the East Burnside joint's employee-owners could not be called underachievers in the ambition department.
The Back to Back adjoins the new Industrial Workers of the World union hall and the cafe's workers belong to an IWW local. The IWW, of course, has been raising capitalist hackles in the Northwest for the better part of a century, pushing a vision of anarchism, direct worker ownership of industry and One Big Union for all laborers. (If the agenda seems as antique as the arcaded 1909 building that houses the Back to Back, consider that the IWW has scored a number of organizing successes in Portland in recent years.)
That's all well and good; the Back to Back makes it seem like these syndicalists might be pretty talented entrepreneurs. A sticker on the door tells you to EXPECT RESISTANCE, but the funked-out mix-'n'-match furniture and personable staff don't offer much. It may be a revolutionary hangout, but it's a damned charmer.
The menu is modest and mostly vegetarian, featuring such rock-ribbed lunch-pail fare as a fine tuna salad sandwich and grilled cheese. (And let's not forget that old working-class fave, the baked-tofu sandwich. Ah well, the proletariat isn't what it used to be.) The java, roasted by Portland's Venus Coffee, comes in a pint glass, the juices are fresh squeezed by an area co-op, and the reading material runs from ReadyMade to The New York Times, with plenty of lefty ink mixed in.
Outside, East Burnside has a sleepy feel--the neighbors here include an artificial limb company, a secretarial service and a ballroom where the latest swing dances are taught. But like the Gotham's bustling industrial neighborhood, this stretch of Portland's in the midst of cultural rebirth, as record stores, second-hand clothes shops and--yep--century-old revolutionary labor unions set up shop in dusty old buildings.
The Gotham Building Coffee Shop and the Back to Back Cafe don't have much in common aesthetically, but both spring from the idiosyncratic spirit that keeps things interesting as Portland molts its old skin.
Gotham Building Coffee Shop
2240 N Interstate Ave. (at Albina Street), 493-2646
7 am - 5 pm Monday - Friday.
$ inexpensive.
Picks:
The fried egg and bacon breakfast sandwich, any lunch special, the coffee.
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Back to Back Cafe
614 E Burnside St., 233-1929,
7 am - 9 pm Monday - Friday, 8 am - 9 pm Saturday, 8 am - 8 pm Sunday.
$ inexpensive.
Picks:
Tuna salad sandwich, the reading material, international workers' revolution.
WWeek 2015