Breakfast in Bridgetown

This whole thing started as a series of travel articles for the Memphis Flyer in Memphis, Tennessee.

It occurred to me that you can write about the essence of a place by writing about how and where it eats breakfast. So I started a series called “Breakfast in … ” I wrote Breakfast in Skykomish, Breakfast on Mount Hood, Breakfast in Hong Kong, Breakfast in the Bahamas, and the one that started it all, Breakfast in Baker, which I described as “a shithole town on the way someplace, or out of someplace. But it happens to be just about sober-up distance on the way west out of Las Vegas or perhaps crank-it-up distance east of L.A. Its proximity to those Pits of Despair means that at any given time somebody weird is in town — a lot of them on weekends.”

And then one day, sitting in the Beaterville Cafe, it occurred to me that I had never done an article about a breakfast place in Portland. Then I thought of all the options I could write about. And within a few minutes, Breakfast in Bridgetown was born — at least, in my head.

So the book is really about Portland, and our lives here. I’m not a restaurant critic, and the book doesn’t have stars or any kind of rating system. For each of the 95 places, I’ll describe it, tell you what I think, throw in what others think, try to tell you how the place fits in the Portland breakfast pantheon, and then let you decide if you want to eat there.

I’ve divided up the restaurants by location and type, and for each one I’ll give you three pages of detailed info (address, hours, types of coffee — all the essentials) as well as anecdotes about the place, the food, the staff, the folks who eat there, and the neighborhood. I cover the whole city, from the mom and pop diners to the fancy downtown hotels, because as far as I’m concerned, every place is interesting, and every place is worth visiting.