New Morning Bakery — Restaurant in Corvallis

With 20-plus years of eating at the New Morning Bakery, here is the good and not so good. Good: Amost-always excellent and diversified food, motivated servers behind the counters, neat restaurant atmosphere with art on the brick wall, usually sufficient seating, and a good ambiance. The art changes periodically and encompasses a wide variety of style and expertise. The display is very interesting.

The owners succeed best at providing a broad variety of pies, muffins, baklava, rolls, cakes, quiche, soup, salads, and bread. I've not seen better anywhere in Oregon.

Not-so-good: The owners fail to provide customers with reliably hot coffee. Remember, owners: one can always let too-hot coffee cool for a moment. No amount of waiting will make one's coffee hotter. The culprit is the reliance on unheated coffee pots to serve customers: the coffee is hot for a bit, then cools down in the stand-alone coffee pot--no heating elements in or under the pots. Hot coffee is a challenge that many restaurants solve, and the owners should do the research needed to always provide their customers with hot coffee.

As an immediate aid to hotter coffee, the owners could provide powdered packets of cream in addition to the cooled cream and milk. This would reduce the labor cost of keeping the liquid cream dispensers full and would let customers who accept powdered cream avoid cooling their coffee with the cold liquid cream. But a better solution is to devise electrically heated coffee dispensers so that employees can more fully direct their attention to serving customers the food they order.

Unrelated to the above is the difficulty of getting baked goods heated well in the microwave oven, which is operated by the serving personnel. One's best bet is to specify how many seconds one's choice of food is to be heated. Failure to do so will often result in luke-warm rather than hot food. On the other hand, if you dislike hot food, then the heated baked goods will be as you prefer.

The caveats about hot coffee should not keep anyone from experiencing the New Morning Bakery: it is simply the best place in Corvallis to go for coffee and goodies, and has the added virtue of offering healthful food for our less indulgent moments. Try it and decide...

TLDR They don’t accommodate curbside pickup for disabled or immunocompromised patrons. I have been a loyal customer of New Morning for over two decades. They even catered my wedding. The consistently great food and go-out-of-their-way friendly service kept us coming back. You could just count on it, which is rare. We would drive up from Eugene regularly to pick up food for a picnic or on the way to the coast. During the early pandemic days we kept making that drive to try to help them stay afloat. But our last few visits were characterized by items missing from our order and food just not being of consistent quality (try eating cold quiche with no fork). And the last straw was when they stopped being willing to bring our pickup order just out the front door so we didn’t have to take the risk of coming in. We would order and pay ahead on DoorDash, which we assumed actually saved them time because they didn’t have to wait on us at the counter. But it got so that when we called to pick up the food, the person who answered the phone would rudely tell us they didn’t have time for that and we’d have to come in. Sometimes if my son called back instead, they would come out. But the experience no longer resembled the one we had come to love. So since we live with someone who can’t risk getting Covid, we will unfortunately miss the wonderful cakes and pies that were always part of our celebrations in the past, as well as the many picnics we had in Corvallis. It would seem better for business to accommodate disabled and at-risk...

Pro: Food looked great.

Con: Poor customer service.

We didn't get to try the food because nobody would help us. We picked out a couple of pre-packaged items (a loaf of bread and a pecan pull-apart-cake) and walked them up to the counter to check out.

There was no line and three people behind the counter. One guy was down at the end of the counter working what looked to be a coffee bar. A female worker passed by us several times without acknowledging us and then began talking to the man behind about his order. It appeared that he'd ordered before we got there and she was finishing his order. We were more than OK with that, except she refused to make eye contact with us and didn't explain what she was doing.

As she was ringing him up another man walked up and stood behind us. A few minutes later, the other female working behind the counter asked the guy behind us if she could get him anything! We were a little annoyed, but were willing to wait for the other female worker to finish ringing the other man up so she could help us. But, as soon as she finished ringing him up she walked away from the register and started doing other things! I tried several times to make eye contact with her to get her attention, but she wouldn't even look in our direction. This went on with both female workers for another few minutes before we just decided to cut our losses and walk out of the store. We had waited at the counter for almost 10 minutes...