LORA AND ROB ROHDE in the kitchen at the Hockinson Cafe, Rob is cooking up some hash browns and Lora is holding a container of her lighter-than-air biscuits. Photo courtesy of FH Browne.
When the Hockinson Café left Hockinson in 2010 and moved up the road to Battle Ground, a bunch of the restaurant’s loyal patrons were saddened by the departure of this small and very popular eatery. But on the other hand, a whole lot of other people were delighted that the comfort food-laden menu, and the café’s famed home-baked pies were settling in the heart of Battle Ground.
Rob and Lora Rohde had taken over the existing café in 2001 but when the lease was up they decided to move from their rural setting to the nearby city. Rob’s background includes a stint as restaurant manager at the famed, and now deceased, Waddles in Jantzen Beach. After marrying Lora in 1994, he convinced his accountant wife to not only be the bookkeeper for his restaurant but due to her propensity for making great pies at home, pressed her into service as his pie baker. That turned out to be a good move.
Primarily a breakfast and lunch place, the café does however serve dinner all day. Lora shares, “We used to serve dinner in the old location and since we have a number of loyal customers, mostly senior citizens, who loved our dinners, we decided that since they usually eat their dinner early we could serve them dinner in the afternoon. We’ve thought about opening in the evenings, but right now are pretty happy with breakfast and lunch. It would be a huge amount of work, and require a lot of staffing to be open for all three meals.”
It’s their breakfasts that garner the most customers and usually the restaurant is filled to the gills by 8 a.m., and since the café seats 150-plus, it’s by far the most popular place in Battle Ground for breakfast. And there’s a good reason over and above its location and brightly-lit, friendly and rustic log-cabin décor: Their menu is remarkable in the choices that they offer hungry diners.
In addition to 8 varieties of 3-egg omelets, which come with “kountry” potatoes or hash browns, toast or a biscuit, you can come up with your own designer omelet, mixing and matching mushrooms, several kinds of cheese, tomatoes, green peppers, ham, bacon or sausage. The Spinach omelet I sampled was about 3 inches thick and loaded, and I mean loaded, with fresh-cut spinach, 3 kinds of cheese (cheddar, provolone and mozzarella), red onions and enough mushrooms to cover a pizza.
I’ve also enjoyed their pancakes, which fill a 10-inch plate, but wisely had asked for only one as I had witnessed the delivery of the “short stack” and decided that there was no way I could finish that – but lots of folks do. At the table next to me, a gent who identified himself as a loyal and very regular customer polished off the Short Stack Platter (2 pancakes, 2 eggs and 2 sausage links) in the time it took me to finish my solitary blueberry pancake.
The restuarant’s “Breakfast Platters,” like the pancake order, are extremely generous and can include a 6 oz. top sirloin, chicken fried steak, ham slices, thick sausage links or their fantastic bacon and all include the hash brown or kountry spuds, toast or biscuits. The bacon is about the best I’ve had in any restaurant and comes from the folks at Daily’s, its meaty, thick, hickory-smoked and will be cooked “any way you like it.”
There are also many of the standard breakfast items you see on menus, including: waffles (Belgian or strawberry), French toast, oatmeal, and arguably the best, lightest, most moist and tender biscuits I have eaten anywhere. My wife Kate and I are biscuit and gravy fanatics, enjoying the best of this breakfast genre all over the South, where they certainly know their biscuits and gravy. But, when my order was delivered and I tasted the flaky biscuit wrapped in their delicious made-from-scratch, of course, gravy, I called Lora over to my table to complain.
“There’s been a mistake here,” I said. “Someone put a cloud on my plate instead of a dried up, stale biscuit.”
“No, sir,” Lora answered, “they are kind of light and fluffy but I can assure you that’s a biscuit!”
And again, this time to my regret, I had asked for a half-order, which more than filled the above-mentioned 10-inch plate. The biscuit ethereal, the gravy tangy with a touch of pepper, was grease-free and smooth as silk.
Lunches (and those dinners) include a wide variety of burgers (beef, chicken, ham, chili, and veggie), the usual lineup of sandwiches (including Monte Cristo, Reuben, Club House, BLT, French Dips and Patty melts), daily special soups, and a nice variety of salads. Dinners are fish and chips and chicken strip baskets, open-faced hot turkey-beef sandwiches with mashed potatoes and veggies, and a “Lo-Fat Platter” of a hamburger patty, cottage cheese, peaches and rye bread.
And then there are the pies – which you can (and should) order for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Move over Shari’s and Marie Callender’s, there a pie queen in Battle Ground. Lora, in addition to greeting folks in the restaurant and doing their books, bakes anywhere from 6-8 fresh pies every day, and has a retinue of 25 or so flavors that span the dessert globe. To name a few: raspberry crumb, chocolate cream, chocolate-peanut butter, sugar-free Marion berry, apple crumb crunch, chocolate-coconut pecan, apple-pecan raisin, and fresh strawberry. Sold both by the slice (a very generous one at that) or as a whole 10-inch pie, they are as good as any you can find in a bakery and are priced at a very reasonable $14.99 each.
A not so-hidden gem, the Hockinson Café is situated just down the street from The Reflector Newspaper at 219 NW 20th Ave. and also has menus for senior citizens and children.
I can’t wait for my next trip. I’m ordering the full order of biscuits and gravy, a side order of that wondrously crunchy, and hickory smoke-flavored bacon, and will probably wash it all down with a fresh piece of her chocolate cream pie. Now that’s a breakfast of champions.
