Cameo Cafe owner Sue Gee Lehn has judged beauty pageants and hosted trade shows. But her greatest legacy comes from her eclectic diner in a motel parking lot. (via eaterpdx)
of the same name for more than five decades, Cameo Cafe exudes an honest, often imitated, never replicated type of cool that is rapidly going extinct in Portland. Each morning starting at 6:30 a.m., Roseway neighborhood locals and Cameo devotees from far-flung corners of the city duck through the diner’s sliding-glass door, plastered with photos and old restaurant menus, in pursuit of coconut waffles and kimchi omelets.
In the dining room, the worn floral wallpaper and cottagecore decor give the space a homey feel and familiarity, with Portland-esque kitsch: Paper umbrellas and ornaments hang from the diner’s chandeliers, and a planter filled with faux greenery glows with Christmas lights. On any given day, longtime waitress Katie Currier ferries plates piled with pancakes — bindaetteok or blueberry — from the open kitchen, sporting novelty shirts stamped with quips like “I forgot your ranch...
In contrast to its Western counterpart, the Korean bindaetteok is made with a mung bean batter that holds a confetti of julienned vegetables., she decided to jump at the opportunity. Despite having no prior restaurant experience and filing for personal bankruptcy around the same time, she bought the Cameo and the land it sits on with a $100,000 down payment pooled from her family. “I invited [previous owner] Alice Smith to my house,” Lehn says.
When Lehn took over, she took on multiple roles, from cooking and waitressing to busing and washing dishes. Since she moved to the U.S. from Seoul as an adult, she’d never eaten many of the dishes she now serves, including pancakes and French toast. Despite this, she transformed the once modest menu to include a laundry list of diner classics, particularly griddle standards. “The Cameo brand is large [portions] — pancakes, omelets — it’s satisfaction,” Lehn says.
But she wasn’t content with just eggs and bacon. From the beginning, she strove to include more of her cultural foods on the menu. In the ’90s, Portland was home to few, if any, explicitly Korean restaurants; within the city’s restaurant world, Korean flavors first emerged on menus at
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