Genie’s: Portland Oregon

Genie's Classic Eggs BenedictGenie’s is one of those places that a friend recommends yet you don’t really give too much thought to.  Perhaps this lack of thought was due to the unexciting, dull description my friend painted of the place, but I was more than pleasantly surprised after I visited the place for breakfast one morning.

The restaurant is certainly not what I expected, not from the way it looked from the street.  It almost resembles an office building with dark reflective windows.  After walking into the place it was hard to imagine that they had the capacity to serve more than a few people at once.  We put our names down on a waiting list and after a couple of minutes we were lead to the main dining area, about the size of a two-car garage.  This is where I understood the appeal of Genies, it finally clicked as I took notice of the Led Zeppelin song that was sneaking out of the speakers near the ceiling, providing everyone with a little 1970’s British rock with which to help digest the food that was being served up.

Trendy? Yes.  Pretentious? Not entirely.  I felt a little out of place as everyone dining there had at least three tattoos and at least three quarters of the men had beards.  This is the way of the entire city of Portland, and it played out perfectly in this small café.  The wait staff provided slightly above average service setting a pitcher of water and four tiny plastic cups on the table for us while we mulled over the menu.  It took us a while to decide exactly what we wanted.  Not because there weren’t enough delicious-looking options on the menu, but because there were so many, and the act of trying to organize our orders so that we could share each other’s selections whilst calculating to maximize the number of menu items that would ultimately show up on our table became quite a difficult undertaking.

The menu, and ultimately the food, is what completely redeemed the restaurant for me.  They had some local twists on the traditional breakfast food.  Everything was local and almost everything was organic.  Eggs benedict made with free-range, locally raised pork.  Eggs from a local dairy, and a side of lavender and sage rubbed sausage.  Some of the best breakfast sausage I’ve tasted.  Potatoes seemed to be a staple here as well.  The waiter informed us that they came in two different varieties, O’Brien, and homestyle.  Both offering their own unique flavors and textures, the former with onions and other spicy bits that added character to the browned starchy side.

I must say that the food was excellent and served to almost completely compliment the previous night’s decision to drink heavily, resulting in a substantial but not entirely unmanageable hangover.  All in all the value for the money was pretty good, the wait staff was ok, and the atmosphere was eclectic but still slightly incongruent with what I had expected from a breakfast joint in this area of town.  Genie’s is the kind of place that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone but my closest friends.  I feel like most people would not appreciate the idea that a place with such excellent food and so much local flavor existed in such close proximity to the downtown area.