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Fearless Critic restaurant review
Portland
Food
Feel
Price
7.8
8.5
$15
Crêpes
Casual restaurant

Hours
Mon–Thu 5:00pm–1:00am
Fri 5:00pm–2:30am
Sat 6:00pm–2:30am

Features Date-friendly, outdoor dining, veg-friendly
Bar Beer, wine, liquor
Credit cards Visa, MC
Reservations Not accepted

www.lehappy.com

Northwest Portland
1011 NW 16th Ave.
Portland, OR
(503) 226-1258
Le Happy
A late-night sweet (or savory) rendez-vous

How do you not love a place like Le Happy? One, the name. Two, it’s absolutely adorable from the outside, with little white lights and a sort of scruffy, rustic look like a yellow Cinema Paradiso. Three, inside, it’s filled with friendly servers, delighted diners, and groups playing any number of provided board games in dim reddish lighting into the wee hours.

The menu is loaded with crêpes. Teeming with them. A page of savory and a page of sweet, with about three dozen different ingredients for mixing and matching. Sriracha, cilantro, and tofu? Gotcha covered. Coconut cream, banana, and Grand Marnier? No sweat. There are even reasonably priced sirloin steaks and a few salads to round out your meal.

This is an ideal crêpe, spread super-thin on a searingly hot crêpe pan, then deftly lifted to sizzle in a pat of butter until it caramelizes and crisps at the edges, while its fillings sizzle away on the griddle next to it. Cheese melts into the pores, and the whole thing folds away all meat juices and sauces, trapping them for bite after bite.

“Le Trash Blanc” is clever, pairing a bacon-and-cheddar crêpe with a can of PBR. But we love “Le Jambon Jambon,” with ham, bacon, Gruyère, tomato, green onion, and Sriracha. A smoked-salmon version is also spectacular. Of course, you’ve got to finish with dessert, and with Nutella on the board, how does anyone order anything else? If you can, end the night with the Spectac, flambéed tableside like a Suzette, but with Nutella and banana instead of orange marmalade.

The wine list is sort of disappointing for what it could be. It’s perfectly appropriate to be this terse, but few are interesting or well suited to the flavors. But we’ll gladly take the Sidre Doux pear cider, which is a magic pairing with just about anything, sweet or savory. There are a couple of beers on tap, and a few more in bottle.

Totally Portlandesque, fun, delicious, and affordable, Le Happy is all it promises to be. Plus they serve at ridiculous hours of the night. If only they’d open for breakfast.