Primrose & Tumbleweeds

Went in for some wine tasting and dessert after dinner Saturday. The staff are very friendly and helpful, and really know their wines! Opted for a selection of Moonstruck Chocolates to have with our wine. Next time, I want to go for lunch — the Hungarian Mushroom Soup on the menu looked awesome!

This was different. Not what I expected. It’s really a retail store with drop ceilings, some water stained. The racks look like Costco racks. It’s using the retail lighting.
The bar is midway back and for beer you have to go to the rear entrance. Was there for a celebration so if was easy to mingle but there are two pinch points do if your trying to circle and meet everyone it can be difficult.
All the wind is stored standing up. They do have a very good selection.

This is one of those places that I wished I could give a «zero» star review for. The owner of this establishment has no time for her paying customers and is very stuck up. The service here is yet to be seen because I sat and waited for someone to acknowledge my presence for at least an hour and a half. I then decided to take my party across the street to The Venetian where they were happy to take my money and reward me with great service. I’ll never return to Primrose and Tumbleweeds and will be sure to share my thoughts with others.

Wine selection decent, hardly «worlds largest Oregon wine offering».
Service is seriously sub par and seems more like an ‘insiders club’ than a proper business.
Water Stained ceiling tiles and shabby carpet with tilted tables doesn’t align with their pretentious attitudes.
Have visited this place 4 times. Experience consistent each visit.
As a local I’d rather spend my time and money at the next facility just down the street.

Excellent food. Nice atmosphere wide choice of wines! Great lunches! Great Mamosas. Hungarian mushroom soup was awesome!

Pleasantly surprised! Great service and a generous wine flight. We’ll be back :)

Nice ambiance. Excellent wine selection. Great cheeses! Prices aren’t bad. The owners are very nice.

I give a solid thumbs up to the wine store portion of the business, but have had less success with the wine bar and dining. For a place to hang out and pass some time there are a number of other places I enjoy on Main Street (Clarke’s, Pizzario, McNally’s and the Venetian) that all get higher marks for ambiance and dining.
Several of the businesses I mentioned above have opened in the last year and definitely have more buzz and excitement. In fact, sometimes I end up at Primrose & Tumbleweeds when the other places are too busy. The interior décor is dated and the vibe is generally subdued. And as another reviewer mentioned, there is a lot going on inside, so initially as a customer I was a bit confused about what was going on where the other businesses are more clearly defined.
Because of their great selection of wine and their excellent location, a revamp of the interior and menu would probably do a world of good.

Food was good. The wine selection is amazing and huge! Love the atmosphere and the people that work there are super friendly

This is a great wind-​down spot. Sweet people, the ambience is really nice, and the quesadillas are to die for!!!

What an absolutely horrible place to spend my precious spare time. Before we came in I placed a call inquiring about happy hour and the moron on the other end replied with the oh-​so-​hilarious-​yet-​unhelpful «every hour here is happy». Oh-​kaaaaay. I then asked if there was a specific menu for happy hour and he directed me to the website which for some odd reason refuses to state what is on the menu saying «We do not post our menu online because we adapt our items as fresh ingredients are available and often have specials.» So why direct me to the website? Why have a menu section at all? We decided to give it a shot anyways just because it was the closest place. Wow, we were we shocked at how disgusting the place was and how apathetic the staff is. We should have guessed by the flippant tone and unwillingness to discuss the menu that the food would be god-​awful. Overpriced, greasy tables, disgusting food. I’d rather drink thunderbird and eat 7 – 11 nachos then come here ever again.

I’m completely underwhelmed by my experience at this restaurant. I was really excited to have a nice restaurant and wine bar with live music in Hillsboro. We’ve been twice on Friday nights and didn’t experience any live music. The atmosphere of the restaurant is really nice and relaxing. The service is very slow and the servers unenthusiastic.
Tonight we had the spinach artichoke dip and didn’t eat it. There were huge globs of mayonnaise and very little spinach. The waitress didn’t even ask why we didn’t touch it.
My pasta with pesto was very dry. Otherwise it tasted good. My husband ordered shaved zucchinni with marinara since he is gluten free. The portion was tiny and he wasn’t offered any cheese to go on top. As he said, «There was nothing special about the meal.»
The water was served room temperature. Our waitress didn’t come by at all except to deliver food so we couldn’t really make any requests to make our meal more pleasant.
The red house wine was great and we also really enjoyed the flourless chocolate cake.
I don’t see us returning for a third visit.

I’m giving this 3 stars only because our main entrees really needed help. Get a chef that actually likes food and this will be winner in downtown Hillsboro!
This is a great little wine shop with an awesome selection of local wines. We really want to see them succeed! But they need to quickly fix the problems with dinner service before they lose too many customers. My wife and I tried dinner here for our anniversary. We were both glad to have a Groupon, otherwise, as another reviewer noted, we would have left like we really overpaid. All was wonderful until our main entrees arrived. We each tried a pasta dish, the shrimp and the chicken. The pasta was totally over cooked to the point of being mush and the shrimp tasted like it was just thawed from the freezer. We were just grateful it was served in a ridiculously small pasta bowl so we didn’t have too much to work through. I don’t understand how a chef could blow a simple pasta dish that bad, it wasn’t even a busy night. Good thing the wine was so yummy!
She tried the Hungarian Mushroom Soup and really liked it. We split the limoncello cake for desert, double-​yum! Our waitress was awesome and offered some great wine selections. We will be coming back, just not for dinner until the food quality actually matches the prices being charged.

I am revising my review to horribly slow service. We have been in several times and purchased wine and every single time we sat down to have just a glass of wine the service was so laid back that it was never a rush to serve you.
We are in the business of customer service,…therefore we won’t be going in there anymore. I can buy wine elsewhere
It’s unfortunate because it has great potential.

I stopped by on a whim in mid-​afternoon on a Saturday I wanted to check it out because they said they allowed dogs. I double-​checked with the staff and then brought my dog Remy in, he had great interaction with meeting the staff and with other patrons. And, I was very, very impressed with the prices. I got a taster of local beers and ciders for $ 5, I thought that was very reasonable. I peaked at the shelf, and they had some great local wines. Overall, it is a really cool wine bar, it’s nice to have a place like this in Hillsboro!

I’m torn about this review. I would have been really unhappy if we didn’t have a Groupon when we went and I appreciate what this store is trying to do, but it needs work around the edges with the kitchen staff.
In general our entrees lacked attention to detail and tasted very packaged. My seafood alfredo had FAKE ‘CRAB’ in it… I really didn’t even know how to react to that – other than pick it out. All of the items had great potential but just didn’t deliver. For the cost and limited menu, we expected all the food to be really good.
The Hungarian Mushroom Soup and the Limoncello cake were quite good. We would return for those two items if for some reason we were trapped in Hillsboro, but likely wouldn’t return. The service was friendly and nice though.

I’m glad this place popped up in downtown Hillsboro. It’s one of the only «nicer» and intimate restaurants in the immediate area. I understand that they used to just be a boutique wine store and the restaurant portion of the place is fairly new. They’re doing a pretty good job.
I had the spinach and artichoke dip, Hungarian mushroom soup (included with the entrée), and prosciutto wrapped shrimp over angel hair pesto pasta. The appetizer and soup were really good, but the entrée was just ok. After I had the shrimp, I didn’t really have enough pesto to cover the rest of my pasta, so I ended up with a bunch of mostly dry pasta. That might have been my own fault for not distributing it well enough, but it still made me sad.
There are both booths and tables, so if you want a booth you might want to make a reservation. They also have a full bar.
Overall, it’s good. I’m not clamoring to return, but I would’t mind coming back, and it’s a good addition to the area.
I’ve also been here to pick up cider — they have an expansive selection that is much larger than what you might find at Fred Meyer.

What a near idea. A wine bar that doesn’t mark up their wines. They go direct to wineries with no middle man so it is a great place to find some Oregon specials.
Yes we’ve been to the ultra chic and expensive wine bars but this feels like a local place that also serves great product. It is cozy and not hyper fancy which actually makes it feel like being in some ones living room.
Hillsboro downtown is so interesting. It’s suburbia all around but downtown feels like a blast back to the 1950s and Pleasantville. :-)

I was at work today when a Groupon popped into my e-​mail: $ 33 for a $ 59 meal at Primrose and Tumbleweeds.
I’d never heard of them, but it sounded just like the kind of Friday night Date Night that Wife N. and I love.
So we bought the Groupon and made a reservation for 6:30.
We arrived, were promptly seated and perused the drink menu. I ordered a 20oz Vanilla Porter brewed by a local Hillsboro brewery and Wife ordered a Blackberry and Elderberry cider. Both were fantastic.
We ordered an appetizer of prosciutto-​wrapped pear slices and stuffed figs. This was excellent. Wife doesn’t eat figs, so I had them all to myself, leaving her with the prized pear slices.
On to the main course. I ordered the November dinner special of Chicken Gremolata, a sliced chicken breast with creamy garlic and lemon gremolata sauce, which had a side of marinated cucumbers, and I also added on a side of their Hungarian Mushroom soup. Wife ordered the Mac and Cheese with a side salad.
The soup was pretty good. It’s not the best Hungarian Mushroom soup I’ve had (that tip of the hat goes to Amadeus Manor in Milwaukie) but it was decent. The chicken, unfortunately, was nearly inedible. It was sliced about a quarter inch thick, and then grilled. I’ve used the term «food police cooked» in other reviews to describe the overall level of chicken breast over-​doneness that appears prevalent in restaurant cooking, to refer to the point at which a restaurant is positive they won’t give anyone food poisoning. These chicken breasts were cooked easily several minutes beyond food-​police cooked, into the land of «sucks all the moisture from your mouth as you masticate.» There was very little sauce on them, perhaps a couple drops of the prized Gremolata (which was good, but a quarter teaspoon of sauce may have well just been «no sauce»). Regular price: $ 14.
Wife’s Mac and Cheese was average at best, bordering on mediocre. It had lots of bacon in it, but that was about the only flavor. Take away the bacon and it was flavorless. It seemed as if they relied more upon flour in the sauce than cheese, and it lacked any kind of tanginess or diversity of flavors that one would expect from a regularly-​priced $ 14 plate of pasta with cheese on it.
The dessert (we chose the Limoncello Cake, lemon poundcake with Mascarpone frosting) was absolutely fantastic. The cake was light, moist, full of flavor and the frosting with its white-​chocolate shavings was absolutely awesome.
Having run the gamut of drinks, appetizers, main courses and dessert, we both came away with the opinion that this place is probably really great for drinks and happy hour. But not so much on the main course cooking. The menu only had three dinner entrees on it. Now, generally when you see three available plates at an eatery, you expect that all of them will be just top notch. But nothing we had met that description. There was chicken, eggplant, and mac and cheese to choose from.
On the «by the bottle» side, this place is definitely where you’d go if you’re looking for that perfect bottle of wine. They’ve got literally thousands. They seem to have gotten rid of the clothing items, in favor of increasing table space (this is good). There’s seating for perhaps thirty in the eating areas.
The service was great, and we’d definitely be back to peruse their wine selection, and maybe hang out for a couple glasses. But dinner here is not on the future menu for us. I suspect if we’d gone here just for some happy hour drinks and snacks, this would have been a 4-​star rating. Unfortunately, the entrees spoiled what would otherwise have been a decent review, but since entrees were what we were here to eat, I’ve got to go with 2*s here.

During my first day in Portland we visited Hillsboro by train (on purpose!!! we don’t wanna have any ‘encounter’ with the Portland PD)
Our first stop was Primrose & Tumbleweeds Boutique & Wine, a totally charming wine bar. They claim to have the most quantity of Oregon wines in the world… and since Oregon is improving on their Pinot quality, this place looked quite appealing to me =)
First we tasted 2 pinots, 1 malbec and 1 blend, and we decided to get the blend
88% Oregon and 12% Washington grapes. Smooth and balanced (IMHO)
They also have food over there, cheese plates and desserts, but since we ate earlier we didn’t have anything just crackers. The cheese plates from the next table looked delicious… maybe next time? They also have Happy Hour menu, interesting
Other thing I’d love to try are their beers, they have a wide variety. Later on I learned that they have Mango beer, that must be fantastic!
Loved the place’s ambiance, very warm yet classy. They treat every patron as a regulars, and of course they also have their regulars who go there every week or every month… that’s what I could imply for the greeting that they gave to some costumers (the costumers greeting was kinda enthusiastic!)
Kudos to Maggie who took really good care of us
Kudos to Doug (the owner)
and again Happy Birthday! (yes we went over there on his birthday) and to Captain
You guys rock!
Highly Recommended!