Oblique Coffee Roasters

My last café review was about Albina Press, a place that I said could be a good substitute for the Portlandia set (I probably have mentioned the show too much already, but this time it’s more relevant than usual). Coincidentally, the café that I’m writing about today was part of the actual set for Portlandia. That’s right, part of your favorite satirical show about the city we drink coffee in was actually shot on-site at Oblique Coffee Roasters.

Oblique Coffee Roasters

Somewhat hidden away on Southeast Stark, not too far from Laurelhurst Park, Oblique Coffee Roasters is one of the nicer spaces for a café that I have seen around Portland. The café is located inside what used to be a mercantile, built in 1891. John and Heather Chandler, the owners, completely remodeled it after they bought it.

Actually, ‘remodeled’ makes it sound like they just did a little fixing up, and it doesn’t accurately describe what they did to the building. You can see all of the work they did here. The transformation of the building is remarkable, and I don’t use that term lightly. What they have now is a beautiful space that makes a great place to write or drink coffee.

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Albina Press (North PDX)

The show Portlandia has been in the news a lot lately (it will probably show up a few more times in Caffeinated PDX in the near future), and it would not surprise me if the show’s writers hung out at Albina Press while coming up with ideas for the show. Located a short walk north of the Mississippi district, Albina Press has a lot of Portland(ia) to offer you.

If you were to go online and read through the reviews of the café, you would find that it gets a lot of love (and plenty of hate) for being the best (or the most pretentious) café in Portland. People seem to think the world of it or they seem to detest it.  I don’t think you should believe too much of what you read on the internet (yes, I am aware of the irony of that statement) so I went to check it out for myself.

Albina Press in North Portland

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Coffeehouse Five-Fighting Portland Syndrome

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Stockholm syndrome is a condition where prisoners start to feel affection for their captors. It gets its name from a robbery that took place in Stockholm, Sweden in 1973. Upon their release after being held inside a Stockholm bank for six days, the hostages publicly defended the robbers’ actions, having established some sort of emotional connection with them.

In the Portland version of the syndrome, the rain is analogous to the bank robbers. After a while, you get used to it and may even start to like it. The other day, I was actually glad it was raining as I made my way over to Coffeehouse Five. I needed some good coffee to get my mind back in order.

CH5

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Paper Tiger Coffee (Vancouver, WA)

When you think of great coffee cities, Vancouver, Washington is probably not the first name that comes to mind for Portlanders. Snide PDX residents refer to Vancouver as “Vantucky” (apologies to my relatives in Louisville), implying that the city is somewhat less cultured than its southern neighbor. This is an unfair characterization, however. I live in Southeast Portland and I can assure you it is not more sophisticated than Vancouver.

Fans of Portland coffee can be a bit the same way. Portland has great coffee and it is tempting to look down on our neighbors. However, if you look around some, you can find good coffee outside Portland. You just have to work a little harder to find it.

One way to keep up on what’s going on around the city and in the suburbs is through social networking. Social networking tools like Twitter can be a great source of coffee information. I might never have found Paper Tiger Coffee Roasters in Vancouver, Washington, had they not been on Twitter. Their tweets made it sound like they were coffee enthusiasts, so I went to go see if their coffee was as interesting as their Twitter feed. It was.

(By the way, if you haven’t already done so, be sure to subscribe to my Twitter feed to keep up to date with what is going on at Caffeinated PDX. Click on the icon on the right sidebar).

The tiger roars

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The Blue Kangaroo

As my friend Norman Bodek likes to say, life has a funny way of giving you gifts. Sometimes you can be pleasantly surprised by small things that happen. Your day might be brightened by a kind stranger, for example, as was the case for me when I went to Blue Kangaroo Coffee Roasters, located in the deep Southeast PDX neighborhood of Sellwood.

The Blue Kangaroo

The Blue Kangaroo café is a friendly place. It is fairly open, with several comfortable chairs and an area for the kids by one of the front windows. It would be a good place to take kids, or even better, it would be a good place to go after you dropped your kids off somewhere, say, at preschool. As you can see from the picture below, the café has its own splash of PDX weird—a flying pink pig hanging from the ceiling.

I didn't see any flying kangaroos

Flo, the co-owner of the Blue Kangaroo, was working the bar the day I was in there, and she told me the story behind the Blue Kangaroo.

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Heart Roasters

It is rough to live in a place where there is so much quality coffee available. After leaving the Spunky Monkey the other day, I walked around the corner to Heart, a two-minute walk over to Burnside and up a block. Heart opened in October 2009 and is owned by Wille Yli Luoma, a professional snowboarder from Finland who lives in Portland. The contrast between the two cafés was evident.

Heart

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Super-Funky Spunky Monkey Coffee

If you are a regular reader of Caffeinated PDX, it probably won’t surprise you that the other morning I left the house without a definite plan of where I was headed (If you’re not a regular reader, you might click on “wandering” in the tag cloud and see what I mean. I tend to wander a lot and have had some very interesting adventures because of that). I knew I wanted to try a new coffee shop but wasn’t sure which one. By habit, I was drawn toward downtown, so I headed for the #19 bus stop. As I was walking along the street, I saw a large pink delivery truck coming towards me. My first thought was “Mmm, Voodoo Doughnuts! I wonder if they’re going to stop in this neighborhood somewhere.” As the truck passed me, however, I was surprised to see that it was not the Voodoo Doughnut truck. Instead, it was the Spunky Monkey Coffee truck.

The Spunky Monkey! I had seen their booth at the farmer’s market at PSU. There was always a long line, though, so I never tried the coffee. Seeing the truck reminded me that I still had not been there and needed to go. Coincidentally, the #19 bus that I was planning to take downtown also swings back out into Northeast Portland close to the Spunky Monkey, so I wouldn’t even have to change buses to get there. It was a good omen—I was obviously meant to go for a visit.

A monk with spunk

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