The Hawthorne: Epicenter of funk

The Belmont/Hawthorne area is what I stumbled on to my first day scouting Portland. We’d been though the town years before on our way to the gorge, but this trip was just to case the place, see if it was the kind of burg we could swallow after hanging onto our sanity after five years on the 495 belt outside of Boston. I came down the slopes of Mt. Tabor onto Hawthorne Blvd and said to myself, yes, this is more like it. Stopped at a likely looking restaurant, the Cup & Saucer, and had a great breakfast of scrambled eggs, cream cheese and jalapenos. After the smoke-smuggered dives we’d put up with for the previous half-decade, that was heaven. I reported back positively to the mother ship that night and a few months later we were ensconced, never to leave.