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Lauren's Day


Today, we celebrated Lauren's birthday with Sunday brunch at Portage Bay Cafe.  


We take our food seriously so this place was for us.


Lauren had Portage Bay Cafe pegged on her radar. We happily granted her wish to have a culinary experience here for her birthday.


The Portage Bay Cafe is known for their Breakfast Bar which consists of fresh berries and cherries (seasonal fruit) along with bowls of coconut, nuts, raisins, butter, and organic maple syrup.  And a little whipped cream.


They are also known for using local, organic and sustainable ingredients - a common trend here in Seattle

and always dog friendly.


We started off with the most delicious coffee (Fair Trade, of course) and Lauren ordered her usual Bloody Mary.


Our server provided us with two complimentary pieces of their coffee cake to start us off. (What a nice guy!)

It disappeared immediately since we were all starving, good thing because you definitely want to be hungry if you come here; yes, large portions.


Lauren and Bruce ordered the Farmer's Hash - 3 scrambled eggs, a variety of local, organic, sustainably grown fresh vegetables, roasted onions, fingerling potatoes, fresh herbs, served with toast and your choice of: locally sourced corned beef, apple chicken or maple pork sausage, house cured molasses ham, pepper bacon, smoked alaskan sockeye salmon, sautéed mushrooms, or sautéed mushrooms with tofu. Lauren ordered the corned beef hash and Bruce ordered the salmon.


It was really nice to get a mound of veggies for a change instead of the usual potatoes.  It was all so fresh and cooked perfectly with the veggies crisp and tender, seasoned just enough.  Ari ordered the signature Oatmeal Cobbler French Toast with oatmeal-crumb crust, seasonal fruit compote and vanilla creme anglaise.  You'd think you just died and went to heaven.


I ordered one of their specials today - Apricot Oven Baked French Toast made with challah bread folded into a rich egg batter studded with apricots, candied ginger and sliced almonds, grilled to order and it included a trip to their famous Breakfast Bar.


To tell you the truth, I could have just devoured it, as is. It doesn't look as spectacular as the others but it tasted out-of-this-world. You didn't even need any butter or syrup, really. Just delicious, as is. But I forced myself to make the trip to the Breakfast Bar and soon it looked like this.


Needless to say, all four of us got boxes to put away our leftovers. We needed to walk-off this brunch so we decided on a walking tour the neighborhood of this foreign South Lake Union neighborhood (SLU, it's now called). I say "foreign" because this is where Amazon has it's offices and those of us who are Seattle old-timers don't even recognize SLU anymore. And the construction just continues.


You can't tell that this is Amazon here because there are no signs designating these are Amazon offices at all. I guess they want to make sure you don't get the idea to personally return a package or something. I couldn't even find an Amazon sign to take a photo of. But this is the headquarters of Amazon.com, yes, indeed.  They employ 25,000 people in here. 


We know the effect Amazon has had on Seattle from our house-hunting efforts. We kept hearing about "the Amazon people" throughout the whole process. How they have jacked up the housing market and house prices. They all want to live close to SLU so all the houses that go on the market are snatched up immediately by "the Amazon people". I recently read about a house in Ravenna that was sold for over $200,000 the asking price, sight unseen. In other words, the buyers didn't even look at the house in person because they were moving here from out-of-state. They are currently hiring 200 people per day.


SLU is now it's own little entity like a small town. The Amazon employees never need to leave SLU because everything is there to live; groceries, drug stores, gyms, dry cleaning, parks, chic restaurants and eateries, like the Portage Bay Cafe...They work long hours at Amazon so they can't take the time to commute to far away neighborhoods or amenities. And they are mostly young people (millennials) so they like quick, fast, convenient, trendy services - the whole millennium generation lifestyle. So, we were intrigued to tour SLU but to our surprise, it was very pleasant and we liked it.  Mercer St. has changed a lot.  It is now the Mercer Corridor, chronically congested with traffic.  Lauren says she avoids it at all costs, like Denny Way. When we lived here 17 years ago, Mercer St was just a connection from I-5 to the Seattle Center, no big deal.


We spent a lovely time walking around Lake Union Park, comfortable weather, perfect temperature, no rain...still waiting for it.








We toured an old tug boat at the Center for Wooden Boats.


Bruce is ready to fix us a drink.


Pretty cozy inside there.


We decided we liked SLU, despite Amazon's presence.  And it never did rain...again.


Until we got home.  Then the first rain came since we arrived here.


But it didn't last long and before we knew it, the sun was back out again.  Shining down on Lauren's Day.









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