This is the era of the waffle. Flavour Spot’s got the waffle-as-taco stance down, and the Little Blue Waffle Wagon has found success serving as an impromptu dessert for Pok Pok diners. Perhaps the most well loved of them all, The Waffle Window is a wee portal cut into the side of Bread and Ink Café. Its Liège-style waffles (the dense, sweet version most often found in Belgium) are served open faced, rather than folded, and come in both sweet and savory preps. Neither will be any good for you, so just throw caution and glycemic indexes to the wind when you come here.
The waffles are made well, a little crisp on the edges and fluffy within. And if it’s too cold outside, the nice folks will let you eat them in the café.
The ooey-gooiest choice here—which you will have to split, as there ain’t no way you’re getting this baby down by yourself—is a Guittard-chocolate-dipped beauty that would be better with a skosh of sea salt to make it more of a soft, very fine chocolate-covered pretzel. Liège waffles get a bit of pearl sugar (harder, larger grains of white sugar that give a crunchy pop of sweetness). The phenomenon works best in a “Plain Pearl” with lemon. It’s also hard not to love a glistening, Oregon strawberry coulis with whipped cream, even though the cream tastes like the thinner, milkier aerosol stuff.
Theoretically, you could eat a lunch- or dinner-type waffle here, like a “Farm Fusion,” and excellent combination of chèvre, roasted red bell peppers (which aren’t the slimy, overrated sort we normally see on sandwiches), grape tomatoes, spinach, and sautéed mushrooms. We’d hesitate to call this a healthier waffle, but it does have some nutritional value and is much more complex, with earthy, creamy, and tart flavors going on. But it doesn’t get much better than a pork product in a waffle, and here you have a few options: add peppered bacon on a “Farm Fusion”; have the bacon with brie, basil, and excellent homemade peach jam (our favorite, although you have to redistribute the ingredients to get the best bites); or Black Forest ham with melting Gruyère and Jarlsberg cheeses, and your choice of rhubarb-rosemary ketchup or maple syrup.
Why choose? We’ll take both, and switch off bite after bite.
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