Grand Central Bakery

Grand Central Bakery is a great go-to, with seven Portland-area locations, and bread made from local flour.

If you’re like me, you like to have something a little special when entertaining, without making a huge mess in your kitchen or spending too much time. That’s where their pizza dough, pre-made pie crust, and puff pastry comes in. You make your desserts yourself — mostly.

In addition to breads and pastries, Grand Central Bakery locations offer breakfast and lunch – the usual sandwiches, salads, quiches and soups. Options change seasonally, with spring sandwich options of this writing such as beet and chevre, and “hot provolone and greens” with “garlicky raab.”

I recently took my six-year-old to Grand Central’s Fremont location, and it was so buzzing on a Friday morning that we barely got two seats together. He got a brioche cinnamon roll — I’d rather not have SUCH an enriched dough, but they had more traditional cinnamon buns as well — and I got a simple breakfast sandwich with egg and Havarti on a potato roll. Earlier in the week I’d gotten a really bad breakfast sandwich from another place that will go unnamed. Really bad. Like overloaded on bad sauce AND undercooked white, could not eat the whole thing bad. Well, lucky for all of us, Grand Central delivered a beautiful, perfect breakfast sandwich, a lovely over-medium egg on a perfectly toasty soft potato bun.

No, they’re not fancy. They’re not the new and hot spot, but they do good work and make excellent food. They source local ingredients and serve neighborhoods. There are always thoughtful and seasonal vegetarian sandwich choices.

Go eat happily.

grandcentralbakery.com