Bread & Ink Cafe

• Bread & Ink Cafe website
• Location: SE Hawthorne district
• Price to fill up two people for dinner: About $70

The Spanish tapas place we aimed for had gone out of business, so Robyn and I strolled Hawthorne looking for the next best thing. I remembered reading about Bread & Ink somewhere, the menu was impressive, and so we gave it a shot.

In the end, it reminded me of the old rhyme: When she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad she wasn’t as good as I’d hoped (or something like that). The first half of our Bread & Ink meal was delicious, second half less so, and overall I give it a big, fat sorta.

Bread & Ink has been around since 1982 (which these days makes it a Portland antique, I suppose), and has one of the most eclectic menus I’ve seen in awhile: Waffle sundaes share space with mojitos and morels, you can have fiddleheads and fresh scallops on your spaghetti or chuck it all and have a burger.

We opted for the fancy menu, probably should have done what our fellow diners were doing and stuck with the burger.

My appetizer, crab bruschetta, was delightful. Robyn had the mussels which were sorta moules mariniere-ish, but with a salty broth. We both liked the side salad we split with warm chevre, grilled asparagus, and toasted hazelnuts.

Robyn chose a pork tenderloin in filo for her entree and it was tender, juicy and flavorful. I’m a sucker for any kind of mushroom, so I picked a sauteed steak in a wine and morel sauce. Both came with enormous mounds of garlic mashed potatoes and well-cooked fresh broccoli.

My steak, unfortunately, was chewy and fatty, with a slightly off flavor. Hard to tell if that came from the aging of the steak or the sauce, and the morels didn’t have much flavor. In the end I focused on the veggies and let the steak fend for itself.

Dessert came with my meal, so we split a rhubarb crisp. Wasn’t bad, wasn’t great, but the aftertaste from my steak kept getting in the way (in fact, it’s still getting in the way 90 minutes later).

Service, OTOH, was fast and friendly.

“When you dissect it down,” Robyn said, “this meal was probably not worth 70 bucks.” No argument there. I wouldn’t mind giving the burgers a whirl sometime, or making a meal of the appetizers and veggies; either route would get you happily fed, I suspect, for half the price.