Regular UP haunt, The Little Red Bike Café, looking for a new home
By Jessie Hethcoat
The Little Red Bike Café, located on Lombard Street between Fiske Avenue and Jordan Avenue, plans to move when its lease ends this June.
"We're in a disagreement over our sub-lease contract," co-owner Evan Dohrmann said. "We feel that if we stay in our current location, our business will be put in danger."
Husband and wife owners Evan Dohrmann and Ali Jepson opened The Little Red Bike Café in August 2007. Since then, it has been a North Portland staple and a UP student favorite for breakfast and lunch.
Open from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday to Saturday, with a Sunday brunch from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., The Little Red Bike Café is a counter-service restaurant famous for fried egg sandwiches and other innovative breakfast and lunch food.
As for the new location of their restaurant, The Little Red Bike Café has not yet found a new site. Many UP students hope that the new location will be close to the original.
"I'm super sad," senior Nathan Haskell said. "It's a really nice location. I like the smallness and that pale-turquoise color."
Dohrmann and Jepson hope to keep the restaurant North Portland's Peninsula area.
"We feel like we've built a clientele of this area," Dohrmann said. "We would like to stay in North Portland."
Dohrmann and Jepson live less than a mile from their current location, and wish to keep the customers they have now.
"The University of Portland has been huge support for our business," Dohrmann said. "On behalf of the restaurant, we can't say thank you enough."
Red Bike has some worst-case scenario plans, but if the owners cannot find a new location come June, it may have to shut down for a small period of time. This amount of time depends on how quickly Red Bike will be able to find a new site, and for now, they do not have a prediction of how long this could be.
"We're really hoping there's not going to be a gap," Dohrmann said. "There's a possibility that we might completely shut down temporarily."
According to Dohrmann, Red Bike offered to buy out the University Coffee location across the street but did not get a reply. While actively searching for a new location, Red Bike has not yet found a viable new option.
Nic LaPonte, 2009 graduate and current Portland resident, likes the current location of Red Bike. Only half a mile from campus, the café is an easy trek.
"The location's nice because it's close to campus and bike-able," LaPonte said. "It's an important fixture of local community."
Sarah LaPonte, a junior at Pacific Northwest College of Art, already makes a commute for the restaurant.
"It's worth coming out to N orth Portland for," Sarah LaPonte said. "I biked eight miles to get here."
With its eclectic, trendy feel, the café is popular for the bicycle-riding, artsy hipster crowd. Red Bike's menu is filled with a variety of creative treats.
On Sunday, it added some new brunch items, like the Blue Cheese, Bacon and Avocado Omelet: bacon, gorgonzola cheese and sliced avocado, topped with brown-sugar pineapple, serve with greens and a buttermilk biscuit and jam.
Red Bike has loyal customers that keep coming back for their favorite menu items. Sophomore Spencer Degerstedt's regular is The Paperboy, a fried egg and cheese on ciabatta sandwich.
"It's a nice contrast of textures from the crispy ciabatta to the viscous yolk," Degerstedt said. "A scrumptious dichotomy."
For the Paperboy amongst many other reasons, the UP community stands behind Red Bike in its time of transition.
