Food & Restaurant SSF Loves | Portage Bay Cafe

Looking around the large open seating room of Portage Bay Café in Seattle’s University District, mouth-watering french toast, pancakes, and waffles rush by me to be delivered to a lucky customer on a Sunday morning.

Along with serving some of the most delicious breakfast/brunch food I have ever tasted, Portage Bay Café has had a commitment to sustainability longer than most other restaurants in Seattle that have been trying to follow the recent “sustainability” trend. Portage Bay Café has “Local. Organic. Sustainable.” as a permanent part of their logo to showcase their large commitment to using less fossil fuels and less resources to produce the delicious oatmeal cobbler French toast, tofu scramble, and so much more to hungry customers.

Portage Bay Café reps their motto, “eat like you give a damn!” on the back of the staff’s shirts as well as on their website. This, of course, can be in reference to eating their large portions of delicious food, but it is more than that. As said on the café’s website “eat like you give a damn about…where your food comes from,” “what goes into your body,” “the ethics of how your food is raised and handled,” “how your food tastes,” and finally, “the environment.”

Portage Bay Café sources as much as they can from local farms, including their décor, providing quality photographs on the walls of the restaurant of their local farm suppliers’ foods, including Full Circle Organic Farm products, Bluebird Farms organic grains, Fonte organic coffee, and much more. With these local suppliers, Portage Bay Café has personal connections to the people who grow the food you eat and therefore, everything is guaranteed to be healthy and even more delicious through the trust developed between the café and its suppliers. And since it is organic, the food does not have unhealthy chemicals that take away nutrients and great taste.

Giving a damn about the food in all these ways is what Portage Bay does best. The restaurant shows their commitment to community as well through the ambience of the restaurant, with old rowing boats mounted on the ceiling (the café is in close proximity to a rowing house, making many in the area feel at home), and catering for life events from Bar Mitzvahs to Weddings. With commitment to sustainability and community, Portage Bay hits the sustainable restaurant mark spot-on in Seattle’s foodie scene.

Talia Rudee | SSF Summer Intern