Paula's Kitchen & Custom Catering

Paula's Kitchen was the last stop for breakfast on our way to a chanterelle mushroom foray in the Coast Range. As I've said in other Yelp reviews, it's often hard to rate American-style breakfast joints - the basics are hard to screw up but harder to transform into something really special and unique. Paula's doesn't pack a lot of surprises and cuts a few of the usual corners, but the dishes were clearly cooked with more time and care than is the norm at small-town breakfast joints.

The three of us ordered traditional protein-n-starch breakfasts - chicken fried steak for me, pork chops for my brother, and a skillet with O'Brien potatoes for my dad. The chicken fried steak was superb - thanks to the ubiquity of Sysco/Sodhexo breaded meat products a truly good and unique chicken fried steak can be hard to find, but Paula's sagey tender steak is the real deal (to be fair, though, the sausage gravy was probably powder-mix ersatz). Brother's order turned out to be cutlets and not real fatty bone-in 'chops, but they were juicy and full of good pork flavor. The O'Brien potatoes were a little dry, but were well-complemented by onions and potatoes browned precisely to the yummy point between "delightful carmelized goodness" and "inedible char." Buttery biscuits completed the meal; I suspect that they may have been made from a mix, but they were delightful anyway.