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Harris Avenue Cafe

Address

1101 Harris Avenue
Bellingham , WA 98225
738-0802

Hours

Every day 8:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Review

The Harris Avenue Café is the kind of place that instantly invites you off the street and into its cozy bosom. Located at street level in a vintage downtown Fairhaven building, this café’s warm and earthy yellow and orange walls at once put you in the mood to just relax and gaze at the world going by. Do, however, take some time to check out which local artist’s works are currently gracing the walls. During Bellingham’s warmer months, you may want to enjoy your meal on the intimate foliage-rimmed patio and pretend you’re in Portugal.

Along with the warm interior comes a warm and cheerful wait staff ready to help you through the usual and not-so-usual breakfast and lunch menu. Though we checked out The Harris Avenue Café for lunch, several breakfast items caught our attention for future visits. The Eggs Toulouse (an eggs benedict-type affair graced by a "silky" champagne tomato cream sauce), Marksville Omelet (Andouille sausage and veggies with a Southern Comfort BBQ sauce), and cinnamon/vanilla/orange French Toast all seemed worthy excuses to return very soon.

While perusing the lunch menu I couldn’t help but notice the pleasant, low-level social hum of the place: friends chatting, lovers cooing, the kitchen faintly clattering, and espresso machines gurgling from the adjoining Tony’s Coffee. In essence, it resonated community. The lunch menu categorized sandwiches as either "Simple Simon", or "Hoighty Toighty", and most were creative innovations on old standards, like grilled Greek tuna salad with melted smoked mozzarella, or roasted turkey with peach cranberry chutney. There were also burgers and salads of various types, and the daily soups looked very intriguing and imaginative (mmmm, onion porter!). Finally, no review of the Harris Avenue Café would be complete without mention of the yam chips (called yam fries on the menu, but decidedly chip-like). A generous mound of this savory side accompanied my sandwich but I shamelessly craved more. A pitiful pile of Lay’s will never suffice again.
Written By: Jeff Nelson
On: 9/22/2004

Directions

From Downtown Bellingham go south on N. State st. (which will become Boulevard st., which will become S. State st., which will become 11th st.), then turn left on Harris Ave. and find the Harris Avenue Cafe two doors down on your left.

Features

Kid Friendly | Beer and Wine | Breakfast | Espresso | Lunch | Outdoor seating | Take-Out

Map

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