GeekEasy Anime Cafe — Restaurant in Portland

I was at this cafe on opening day and while I desperately want to support and like it so I will start with the good. I love the atmosphere of the cafe. It usually has some form of ghibli cover playing and has lots of anime inspired decor. The artwork on walls is really cool too. The person who took my order was very nice and I had 0 issues there. The issues I had were with the food unfortunately.

I had ordered a mocha which was on their menu, with almond milk. What I got tasted extremely watered down for some reason. It was also lukewarm and had only hints of coffee flavor (more like tea). So I said to myself "hey maybe unlucky I'll try something else".

I then ordered their pork katsu dish. Having lived in japan when I was a kid I had certain expectations of katsu and I like the texture a lot. What I received was breaded deep fried tough whole meat. The curry it was served with almost seemed powdered, it wasn't similar to golden curry you can get from the store or what is used on their imagery for the food. I took a bite of it and me being a super sensitive to textures person, honestly, didn't like it. It was chewy and overcooked. I took several more bites because I felt obligated since I had spent almost 17 dollars on it. My stomach began hurting not long after.

Later that night I got food poisoning. I can say with certainty it was the katsu. Fortunately my body was able to violently expel it at the cost of my sanity and hours in the bathroom.

I will try other menu items in the future in hopes of finding something I can handle because I like the atmosphere and employees, but it is my obligation to put this review as it is right now because I don't want someone experiencing what I did. I'll update the review as...

It is incredibly difficult and frustrating to find any information if you are not local to the restaurant. They have no website or phone number that I could find, and the only way I could find to contact them is through Instagram, which I don't have.

Luckily, one of my friends was able to reach out via Instagram to ask about their hours, which are also not listed in any verifiable spot online (including their Instagram from what we could see). When we asked if we would need a reservation for a group of 6 people for my spouse's birthday dinner, they responded with "A reservation for what?", which we found unprofessional and implied that the person running their Instagram messages was unfamiliar with how most restaurants work.

The only good to come out of that conversation is that the person saw fit to inform us that there is an event on the day we were planning so we wouldn't be able to get a seat anyway. This event is not advertised online in any way outside an unlabeled link on the Instagram page, which doesn't even go to an informational page as of my writing this. It just goes to a page that says "Ticket Sales have ended".

If my friend hadn't thought to ask about the reservation, we would have driven nearly 2 hours only to be turned away when we got there. No food is good enough to justify this level of difficulty when it comes to planning a trip from out of town. I will be taking my spouse elsewhere for their birthday, and I would caution anyone trying to visit from out of town to rethink adding this place to...

Been reading manga since the early 90's. It's been 3 decades since then and I now have kids who were the same age as me when I first started reading manga. This location used to be a Chinese tea house if I remember correctly (Red Robe I think?) that my husband and I used to frequent when we first moved to Portland, so I had lots of fond memories in the actual structure itself.

This place was a DREAM. Came in on on their pop-up, only had 1 drink and 1 food option, so I ordered both. Everything was beautifully decorated - manga scenes all over the walls, Ghibli decor on the placemats and cafe tables, lo-fi of the Pokemon center theme running on the background which took me back to my GBA Pokemon Leaf Green days. Food and drink was DELICIOUS. I expected 3 nugget-sized chicken pieces - but got a heap of karaage that was fried just riiiight.

The manga selection was awesome. I thought it'd cater more to just the more mainstream and recent hits, but it was surprisingly varied and had a lot of the niche titles that I considered hidden gems. I settled into reading volume 4 of Naoki Urasawa's Monster, teared up at some of my favorite scenes and slowly savored my food and drink. I only had an hour to spare and I wished I'd budgeted more time.

Only other thing that could've made the experience better was maybe some plush throw blankets and more pillows (Costco's got some great giant Pokemon squishmallows now) for the readers who like to get cooooommmfffyyy. Definitely gonna tell all of my fellow geeks - what an...