Traveling Feast

A friend sent me a distressed text yesterday from home (Spokane): “AAACK!  What happened to Bittersweet Bakery?  It is empty and has a for lease sign in the window.”

I’m in California briefly, but I’m already in mourning even before I see the sign with my own eyes.  The Bittersweet Bakery on the lower South Hill has been a strikingly hospitable… dare I say it, happy… spot for coffee, from-scratch pastries, and unique and delicious crepes.  Invariably when I arrived, the sun would be streaming through the front windows onto the hard wood floor and the corner of the pastry case.

If hungry, I ordered a crepe.  If not, I still rarely could resist a scone.  And now it is gone.  If any of you personally know the owners, could you pass along a way to contact them?  I’d like to thank them for the numerous bright mornings I enjoyed at a table not far from the door.

Daryl – the iconic figure behind the best maple bars on the planet has not returned to Spokane’s Donut Parade after nearly dying in ICU as a rare disease attacked.  But on my last visit a little over a week ago, Daryl’s maple bars are back on the shelves and the magic is still there.  For forty years he was the maple bar man, but apparently he was able to pass on some of his secrets.  The current bakery crew is turning out fine product that is still far better than anything else available.  I admit, this had me up worrying at night.

Get well Daryl and long live your brilliant bars.

One welcome change: the name “Donut Parade” is now painted on the door in rough letters.  For years there was almost no indication outside that the best maple bars on the market were available inside.  If you drove by on Hamilton, chances are you’d only see what appeared to be an abandoned building.  Of course they still don’t have anything so obvious as a sign.

Anne suggested we try Le Pichet or Lola for breakfast, and Lola’s online sample menu included a ’sweet pea omelette’. This tipped the scales in favor of Tom Douglas’ 4th Avenue restaurant.

I’ve been looking for an excuse to swing into Lola since last fall when I worked for five days alongside Cammie and Josie on an organic goat farm.  They both worked on Douglas’ staff at Lola, and spoke highly of the food.  Yesterday presented that opportunity in the hopes of a sweet pea omelette.

Unfortunately the sweet pea omelette was on hiatus in favor of a Dungeness crab version.  The only sweet peas on the menu appeared as part of Tom’s Big Breakfast that promised “pacific octopus, sweet peas, pork belly, and a sunny egg” for 16 clams.

Now my history with octopus-started years ago in Chinatown in college-has mainly consisted of chewing the tasteless equivalent of Michelin tires.  Yet if Douglas was willing to feature this member of the mollusk family so prominently on his menu, I decided to risk another run-in with rubber.

It was a risk worth taking.  Douglas’ octopus was stunning and anything but road-worthy.  Add in a light cream sauce with fresh herbs that puddled on the plate, the pork belly, sweet peas, and slivers of sauteed onion under an egg, and the result was both wonderful, unexpected, and a far cry from your typical big breakfast.  After several tentative bites, you forget the dish’s exotic ocean and farm origins in favor of simply enjoying the flavors.

Afterwards you can slip across the street and pick up a loaf of fresh bread from the Dahlia Bakery (another Douglas business) for lunch or dinner.  And if you don’t have a hard and fast rule of ‘no dessert after breakfast’ you might try one of the bakery’s cherry almond scones or a coconut cream pie bite.