tastymate blog

Tasty Spot Showcase: Toast

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 04:08 UTC

When we moved into the Woodstock neighborhood of Portland, Oregon over a year ago we had no idea what wonderful new establishments were about to open.

On August 18th, Donald Kotler opened Toast. We were excited about the prospect of a neighborhood breakfast spot, so we rushed in to try it. We sat at the counter, which was wonderful because we were able to see the lovely, small, clean kitchen. It was the height of tomato season and the chef was slicing the most beautiful yellow heirloom tomatoes. When our breakfast came we couldn’t help but think this restaurant will be more then a local spot and people will soon start traveling across town to get to our new breakfast spot.

Toast was opened in the exact same spot as “bad ass video” (a used porn store). You would never know this sitting inside the bright, clean, simple cafe, except for the sandwich with fried eggs, cured pork belly and shaved Gouda on toast that goes by the same name of “bad ass.” It’s the wonderfully fresh, simple food that makes us want to go there at least once a week. Don believes in fresh ingredients and most of the condiments are made in house. Toast uses local farmers and vendors, Don even grows herbs out back.

Writing about this neighborhood gem wouldn’t be complete with out mentioning the burger on their brunch and dinner menu. It’s the best burger we’ve ever had. It’s made from fresh local beef that’s ground right in the Toast kitchen, the special ingredient is course sea salt, ground right in. Every time we go in it’s hard not to order it, but everything on the menu is delicious.

Thank You Toast for bringing our neighborhood fresh local mouth watering food.

We just can’t thank you enough.

Tasty Spot Showcase

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 12:56 UTC

One of the main reasons why I started tastymate was to help promote the tasty spots where they have a real passion for the food they create.

Coming soon Tasty Spot Showcase. This is where I will feature a tasty spot and give some background on the place.

First up, will be Toast in Woodstock neighborhood in Portland, Oregon.

A little house cleaning on a Sunday morning...

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 04:45 UTC

I made a couple of minor updates. The list of tasty spots and members are now sorted by number of tasty votes and tasty spots, respectively. I did this just to make the site look a little bit more active. I will continue to work on these pages to make it useful for members.

enjoy, graeme

First round of enhancements

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 03:09 UTC

For starters, I created a News tab (which you are one now). If you want to keep up on the latest happenings at tastymate, then please subscribe to our feed.

Everyone can now add their own cuisine types and pricing to a Tasty Spot. The member who created the spot, can update the name, address, hours, and website. Eventually, I would like to allow all members to update a Tasty Spot.

When a member adds you as a contact, you will be notified by email. You can turn off this email on your membership page.

There were several suggestions that I am still working on. If you have suggestions, please email me.

To my surprise, I had my first write up. Take a look over at silicon florist.

Cheers, Graeme

In the beginning...

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 03:25 UTC

tastymate has been online for a little over two weeks. There were times where I completely thought about abandoning the idea, but Anisa kept me going. It was our trip to the Thread Show in San Francisco that really got me inspired again. There were several times in San Francisco where tastymate would have come in handy and a lot of the ideas came from our trip to San Francisco. We tried a couple of other sites to find tasty spots in San Francisco, but they were just too busy and took too long to download on our iphone. Our biggest grip was that we didn’t know the people that were reviewing the places. Since we didn’t know them, we could really trust their reviews.

Once returning to Portland, OR, I decided to devote all of my free time to getting tastymate launched. Its amazing how quickly you can work to get something done when you are inspired.

Overall, I am very happy with the first release of tastymate. I was really surprised that I have a nice little pocket of members from Ireland and they have given me some great feedback.

After some minor enhancements, I am going to make a bigger push to get the word out about tastymate.

I will use this blog to announce new enhancements. So subscribe to this blog, if you would like to be kept up to date on tastymate.

Cheers, Graeme