Rose’s Restaurant and Bakery

This place continues to go down hill… food is overpriced and the service is worse.

The service has been really poor lately. It took 10 minutes today to get a bowl of chowder to go. When Alex is not there the staff service is really bad. Let week took over 15 minutes to get my to go order and 5 other people got theirs who had ordered after me. Today one person who had ordered after me got their stay in order before my to go bowl of chowder.

Meh.
Pros: The staff is friendly, and the grab-​and-​go items are convenient.
Cons: The food is mediocre and overpriced for the quality.

Mainly I come here out of convenience since it’s close to my work. The breakfast sandwiches are fine. I would avoid the buffalo chicken panini– it was disgusting. Deserts are tasty. They have HUGE cakes too. Overall, the place is ok but a bit overpriced for what you get.

Don’t understand why all the negative reviews? I have nothing but good things to say about my visit. I purchased the regular Reuben Sandwich with pasta salad, so good, very flavorful, everything about it was delicious! I also got the Bbq Chicken Salad to go and a slice of Carrot Cake. The Bbq sauce on that chicken was the best. It came with ranch dressing, but with the bbq sauce mingeling with the rest of the salad I really didn’t need it. My slice of cake was huge, for only $ 3.00 you can’t beat it. Can’t wait to go back again.

Convenient. Second time here. The sanwiches are not very good. The bread is toasted to the point of being like a croûton. Reuben is just sliced deli meat. Pickles on the side are tough and chewy. Salads are meh. Soup was bleh.
On the plus side, the workers are friendly enough. But the price and food quality will keep me from returning.
I did not try their desserts or pasteries and do not expect that they would be much better than the food although they look very nice.

I’m surprised at all the negative reviews, although I have only stopped in for breakfast to go, so perhaps the experience varies. I found the service attentive and the food tasty. The hash browns could be more crispy, but the bagel sandwich is delicious. They say they have a real New York bagel… not quite, but definitely among the better versions I’ve had on the west coast, and definitely the best I’ve found in Portland so far. They’re right across the street from my office, so the location and convenience are great for me. Hopefully I feel the same way once I get to try lunch.

Convenient location, nice selection of deli sandwiches and salad. Excellent cheesecake!

I ordered the cobb salad. The box contained deli ham, deli turkey, bleu cheese crumbles, shredded mozzarella, bacon, hard boiled egg, onion, tomatoes, garbanzo beans on a bed of fresh, crisp romaine lettuce. Maybe I am being too picky here but I would have preferred real turkey breast, cubed and for the ham to be cubed as well. Instead the sandwich deli meat was haphazardly cut and almost shredded. I have also ordered the southwest chicken salad which has real grilled chicken breast but it is so dry you have to drown your salad in dressing to keep from choking on it. I have also tried the burger and it was actually pretty good. I am not a big fan of sandwiches so I could not tell you how they are but my office orders sandwich platters from this place all the time for lunch meetings and my co-​workers seem to like it.

As a tenant in the WFC, I eat from Rose’s regularly, either boxed lunches for meetings or because I brought no lunch from home. As time has passed, the quality has gone downhill. My most recent examples are: (1) The special of the day: Shrimp on Caesar Salad with «a side of bagel chips» — there were no bagel chips there and I wasn’t going to travel down 30+ floors to get them. (2) Grab and Go Salads, intended to be quick but satisfying — whoever makes them should not put shriveled grape tomatoes in there, or before the salads are put in the case each day, someone should look at them. (3) Grilled cheese sandwich — a day needing comfort food, but the sandwich tasted like dirty grill. Having owned a restaurant for five years, I know what that smell (and ultimately the taste) should not be. Finally an observation: the chicken salad, tuna salad and egg salad used to have flavor and were delicious for sandwiches or scoops on salad — no more. All have become tasteless. It is getting more and more difficult to voluntarily get lunch from there.

So dissapointed in Rose’s Deli… The chicken noodle soup was saturated in so much salt I couldn’t even stomach it. The chicken salad was bland and flavorless, thankfully they added a tomato slice and mixed in some celery because I had to eat something. And at the bottom of my to go box was a lonely little limp pickle. So sad. I have to admit the cashier was really friendly and we had a nice coversation but sorry the food left me wishing I had never come here.

I wish they had negative stars. This place deserves negative stars. We lived in Portland in the late 70’s when Mt. St Helens erupted. Before Starbucks. Before the internet. What did people do back then? They went to Powell’s of course. And afterwards they went to Mama Roses. Oh that was heaven. It was packed for breakfast. People dropped by for blintzes and matzoh ball soup and chicken liver sandwiches that you could barely finish. The children’s burger was the same size as the adult burger. But you had to be under 12 to qualify for one. Kids? No problem. The place had such a great buzz that no one ever heard the kids, yours or anyone else’s. You heard that constant sound of clanking dishes and happy people and silverware and even if you’d never been east of the Rockies, you felt you were in a New York Deli.
When we moved from Portland to Seattle, we still missed Portland so much that our other children, who’d never lived there, made trips with us to Roses’s and Powell’s and Tillamook 2 and 3 times a year. We never did try the giant cakes. The donuts were as big as a dinner plate and cost $ 1.The Napoleans were unequaled in size and price. Even bakeries in Vienna didn’t make them better.
When our son left for college in ’96,we moved to Northern California. June, 2014 was our first road trip back to the area and I couldn’t imagine there would be no trace of Rose’s left. There were 5 or more restaurants when we moved. Downtown-​this large cavernous office building-​this-​had what was left of Rose’s. No chopped liver. No pastrami on rye. Even the one rye sandwich they had was on marble rye. No caraway seeds. And no beer. Mama Rose isn’t rolling over. She’s howling at the inhumanity of a deli serving pulled pork and Snapple. 3 twenty year olds were ignoring the few customers as best as they could. 2 Mexican workers in different clothing were obviously there purely to work and clean. The 3 were utterly useless and annoying. They couldn’t answer questions, «were the other branches still open?» and they got downright rude when I asked about the donuts. «Yeah, yeah. We heard about the donuts. No more. «There were flies crawling on the sweet rolls.
Goodbye Mama Rose. It’s a crime for this place to stay open with the original name on it.

I’ve ate at this location twice. Both times got good service. Food was really good too. Came out pretty quickly. I had the pulled pork 1^st time & 2^nd was a salad and a wrap (I was starving) and all of it was really good!

Because I work in the same building downtown as Rose’s, it is many things to me. It’s a place where I get my morning coffee if I want something better than the meh stuff we have at work. It’s a convenient place to get a delicious, if somewhat overpriced, lunch. It’s also where I can get things I need sometimes if I bring my own lunch, like salad dressing (that’s only 25 cents) or a bag of chips to go with a sandwich. And, to paraphrase Cheers, everyone knows my name there. Which is nice.

I go here when I can’t really figure out what to eat for breakfast or when I realize I left my lunch at home.
The service here leaves something to be desired but the food is ok. The people who work there pretty obviously don’t want to be there and are kind of unpleasant — which is consistent in the several times I’ve been there. I’ll keep going there but wouldn’t recommend it to other people, I don’t think.

I was last here almost three years ago for lunch, and my co-​worker claims that I couldn’t stop saying that this was «literally the best salad I’ve ever tasted».
I figured I’d head back to Rose’s for lunch and to check out their salad selection (yet again). I went for the Cobb (tons of fun on those salads, you can’t go wrong) and was happily impressed, since there were things on the salad that weren’t referenced on the brief menu (like cheese and tomatoes). I asked for avocado on top as well, and they added it without a hitch (or an extra cost. maybe it already came on the salad, and I just didn’t know it).
I got the salad to go, in a nice size box. When I opened it up, I was greeted with quite a pretty picture (I should have taken a picture) — ham, turkey, bleu cheese crumbles, shredded mozzarella, hard boiled egg, avocado, onion, tomatoes, their special creamy ranch something or other dressing (made by them, and on the side) all on a bed of fresh, crisp romaine lettuce (I may have overlooked an ingredient or two). I must note I did not ask for bacon (as that is probably the main reason some people get Cobb’s in the first place), and they didn’t put any bacon on there (something that is often overlooked).
The salad was slightly pricey for me ($ 8.75 I believe) but I was able to get two meals out of it it was so large. I’ll definitely be back for another salad, and this time it will be less than three years between visits.

It’s delis like this that make me fume with anger. This place is really close to my work, and it seemed like a good option for sandwiches. I had always seen people coming out of here and the line is usually quite long, so I figured that something decent might come out of the kitchens here.
I just wanted a quick, nice, simple turkey sandwich, and I hoped that they could fill such an easy request. What I got for 8 bucks was two slices of dry, shitty bread stuffed with (yes it literally looked like it had been shoved in there) low quality, tasteless turkey. There was a paltry piece of lettuce too. Oh, it also came with a packet of mustard and a packet of mayo.
Maybe the 10 dollar rubens are the things worth getting, but I doubt they are worth it. I’m never going back here again.

Rose’s is a good place for lunch and breakfast. They have an assortment of bagels, pastries and even make omelets in the morning. Usually I get a white chocolate mocha and a bagel, but if I am really hungry I opt for the cheese omelet with hashbrowns and toast. They even give you juice with your breakfast so for the price you get a lot of food and a drink.
They have a really good variety of sandwiches, soups and salads for lunch. The roast beef sandwich is tasty and they have good clam chowder. The desserts they have are heavenly and you can’t help but drool over them while while waiting for your food. The breakfast prices are reasonable, but some of the lunch menu items are a little too much. They do give you a good amount of food though. The food is good and the service is friendly. Overall it is a great place to eat.

Rose’s is a variation on a theme. A deli located in a big tall office building, catering to those who need a bagel and coffee in the morning but can’t be bothered to throw it together at home, people whose lunch breaks consist of shoveling food in their mouth between meetings, executives that are more concerned with remembering to eat than what they actually end up eating, and of course the lazy.
They’re all pretty much the same in that they all have some issue, be it quality, price, service, whatever that keeps you from getting excited about it, but rarely bad enough that you will swear them off.
Rose’s offers up bagels, pastries and a few full breakfast options for breakfast, and salads, soups and sandwiches for lunch. The food is far from bad, but that won’t stop you from bitching about how they suck when you just paid $ 9 for a salad that should have cost $ 5 – 6. The baked goods are pretty tasty and the cookies are the size of your face, but they don’t make them in house.
There are some more reasonable priced options. A bagel with cream cheese is under $ 2, and if you just want a couple items breakfast-​sandwich style ordering add-​ons is typically pretty inexpensive. They have a «small bites» menu at lunchtime as well which is all under $ 5 if I recall correctly.
For all that’s uninspiring about Rose’s, their service is excellent. These guys are on top of it, busting ass during the morning and noon rushes and equally efficient during the off hours, and always friendly.
I’d end with the almost obligatory «good option if you need/​want something super close, but go elsewhere if you have time» but that theme is implied. If you work in the Fargo tower, you will still end up there at least a couple times.

We’re «foodies» (or at least want to be), we hang with them, but I’ve never heard anyone recommend Rose’s. «Rose’s has the best…» has never graced my ears. What I do hear is, «it’s raining, f_​_​k_​_​g — A, I guess it’s Rose’s.» That is, the majority of the lunch crowd seems to go there because they work in the building or nearby. It’s definitely more crowded when it’s raining or during the winter.
The Caesar Salad is telling of the other offerings: it comes with those ‘70s Sizzler style croutons, the kind that look like they came out of a plastic bag. The Roasted Red Pepper is one of their better soups, the others are merely average. Slight kudos for their Reuben’s, but they are a far cry from the Goose Hollow Inn’s version. The espresso is borderline awful, the drip coffee about average. Desserts are good, but definitely overrated. Their staple is the Chicken Noodle Soup… Campbell’s is a staple in many homes.
Most of the staff is very nice, the owner very involved and a good guy. Prices? Uh, the place doesn’t scream value, so that’s certainly not an attractive feature. The crowd seems like the type that loves the Olive Garden. That means whatever you want it to mean, just sayin’ that’s all.