Eatery puts big spin on cycling

North Portland cafe offers discount, perks to two-wheeling patrons

By Jonathan Fine

Pamplin Media Group, Oct 9, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

At the bike-through window of North Portland’s Little Red Bike Cafe, co-owner Ali Jepson serves customers Rachel Paul (left) and Lucas Clark, who made the journey from Southeast.

L.E. BASKOW / PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP

Evan Dohrmann watched the cars idling in Taco Bell’s drive-through lane next door until it dawned on him: His new restaurant, the Little Red Bike Cafe, could go one better.

The cafe’s sidewalk window would henceforth be the “bike-thru” window, a gesture meant to emphasize the eatery’s pedal-centric theme and draw in members of a robust and growing demographic.

“We recognized the huge importance of the various bicycling communities in town, and we wanted to honor and cater to those people,” says Dohrmann, 26, who runs the cafe on North Lombard Street with his partner and fiancée, Ali Jepson, 25.

The cafe had its grand opening Sept. 29, with a portion of its revenue earmarked for the Safe Routes to School program, a national effort to encourage kids to bike and walk to school.

The cafe’s bike-through window opens at 3 p.m., when the front doors close, and stays open until the staff finishes cleaning up inside and decides to call it a day.

“Bike-through” is interpreted loosely; customers arriving on foot and skateboard are never turned away. But the cafe reserves its highest honor – a 50 cent discount – for its cycling customers.

Inside the bright, airy cafe, a floor pump for bike tires sits next to the front door for customer use. Bicycle repair kits are offered for sale in the cooler, alongside pies and chocolate truffles.

Vintage French bicycling posters decorate the walls. The theme spills over to the menu, which features hearty breakfast sandwiches such as the Paperboy Special, the Messenger and the ZooBomb, named for the weekly nighttime descents in Washington Park.

For some, it’s reason to ride

Having envisioned the cafe as a homey gathering place for their Portsmouth neighbors, Dohrmann and Jepson are discovering that it also has become a destination for recreational riders who may pedal for miles to get there.

“We get messengers, commuters, cyclists on their way to Skyline Boulevard, all kinds of bikers,” Jepson says. “We’ve had a lot of customers from all the way in Sellwood who get here via the Eastbank Esplanade and the bike lane on Willamette Boulevard.”

Dohrmann and Jepson look for the cycling spirit in their vendors, too. Joel Domreis of Courier Coffee Roasters rides his customized delivery bike for an hour from his Southeast location to drop off hand-illustrated bags of beans.

“We work with as many small, local vendors as we can,” Dohrmann says. “We feel we can offer higher-quality food by buying locally.”

Bicycle-friendly businesses certainly are nothing new in Portland, named by Bicycling magazine as the country’s best cycling city. Staccato Gelato, for example, offers a “frequent biker” card, while the Black Sheep Bakery operates its own bike-through window in Southeast Portland.

But on the North Portland peninsula, where resident cyclists say the car-to-bike ratio still is much higher than in other parts of the city, the Little Red Bike Cafe is seen as breaking new ground.

Rest of city’s catching on

For Jonathan Maus, a bicycling activist who edits the popular Web site bikeportland.org, the Little Red Bike Cafe is proof that bicycle advocates are spreading out from their historic base in Southeast Portland, motivated in large part by the need for affordable housing, and putting down their kickstands in new parts of the city.

“The cafe is symbolic in that sense,” Maus says. “And though Portland is a big bicycling city, we’re still in the minority. So we tend to get excited when a business makes a special effort to acknowledge the bicycling community, and word spreads.”

As Portland grows denser, bicyclists probably will enjoy more accommodations, while the city’s venerable drive-through lanes increasingly will be at odds with many residents’ favored transportation.

Many fast-food restaurants close their front doors before midnight but keep their drive-through lanes open for several more hours, or even all night. The result of this practice is that late-night diners who want a quick taco or burger often have to get in their cars – even if they live a block away.

For liability reasons, many businesses with drive-through lanes turn away pedestrians and bicyclists.

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