Honeymoon: Wanda's Café, Nehalem OR

Monday April 29, Nehalem OR

For our first meal in Oregon and on the recommendation of the ladies from the Sleepy Monk, we stopped at Wanda's Café just on the 101 in Nehalem. It's a tiny one-story house with gray-green siding and an extended front porch just on the side of the road across from the vast (I mean, don't blink, you'll miss it) Nehalem Post Office.

Inside, it becomes immediately apparent that funky retro is the décor theme here. On separate walls are toaster and radio collections from '50s and '60s on loan from a local vintage store. And the restaurant's tables and chairs are vintage dinette furniture.

Retro Toasters at Wanda's Café

And Radios

Wanda's claims to fame are that they serve breakfast all day (awesome!), bake their own goods on site, and feature Sleepy Monk coffee. Ann ordered a roast beef and spinach sandwich on ciabatta with blue cheese mayo. As you can see in the photo, it looks like a really good, fresh sandwich. I went with the breakfast-all-day concept and ordered a longtime favorite, huevos rancheros. My twin fried eggs over tortillas and black beans were decent but I wanted more flavor in the ranchera sauce. While the pico de gallo served on the side was miserable from want of ripe tomatoes, seasoning, and some fresh cilantro, the eggs were well executed.

Roast Beef and Spinach

Huevos Rancheros

Sleepy Monk coffee or not, we were coffeed out by lunch time and we were on vacation, so it was time to drink something stronger. In what looked to me like a decidedly beer joint, Ann ordered and received a jelly jar of some random undrinkable red wine which our server was kind enough not to charge us for, when he saw that Ann didn't touch it. I understand why she tried the wine: she doesn't really like beer. With my huevos, I ordered Session lager from Full Sail Brewery up on the river east of Portland; I have this thing for lager with Mexican food. I ended up giving it to Ann because all she drinks are light, lightly hopped, low malt beers and ordered a Bridgeport IPA for myself.

When in Oregon...

...Drink the Local Beer

Bridgeport is the beer that I drank when I used to frequent Portland and is the brewpub that I most often used to visit. The beer is still really, really good and this IPA is no exception. I would taste several other of their beers at the brewpub in NW Portland later in the week.

I liked Wanda's and its personality and character. We found the food OK here and if we were locals, we might drop by from time to time.