Cafe Voila

Check the daily specials different everyday. Once I had Lamb stew another time spinach tomato soup. All delish!

Their Caribbean black bean soup made me ill. Feeling lethargic like I was poisoned. That was all I had at lunch so I know that is the cause!

Wow. the buicuit, egg, smoked Canadian bacon with hollandaise sauce is very good. A must try. They make everything from scratch and smoke their own meats. The owner is the chef and they do catering

I’ve been wanting to write a review about Café Voila after seeing some of the reviews on here. I can only speak from my personal experience and I’ve been coming here since 2011. My boyfriend brought me here for lunch when we first started dating and I thought they had really good food. Soon after; we opened our business in downtown Portland so I started coming to Café Voila more often and got a chance to enjoy more of their delicious and fresh dishes. I always make a point to stop by Café Voila on my way to work to pick up breakfast, either their Canadian Bacon and Egg Biscuit or their Egg White Frittata. For Lunch, I love their Entrée salads: Smoked Salmon Salad and Roasted Gold Beets and Apple Salad. Their Soups are also incredible, I pretty much like everything that they make for the week and will order 2 large soups to go quite often. I used to love their Tuna Sandwich and Turkey and Brie Sandwich but I’m gluten-​free now so I eat their soups and salads. Once in a while I will have their Hot Lunch Entrée Special depends on what they have that day, this week I had their savory Pie with chicken and chanterelle mushrooms, delicious!!! For dessert, right now my guilty pleasure is their Candied Cranberry Molasses Cake, you’ve got to try it and I promise you will fall in love with it just like I did. Oh and did you know that if you sign up to be on their mailing list; you will get to preview their weekly menu on Sunday via email so you can see what they will be serving for the next coming week? Also, you will receive an email if they have a Friday SALE around 2:30pm on; they will have a 50% OFF sale on all of their soups, sandwiches and salads so you can stock up for the weekend. I enjoy eating good food and healthy food and Café Voila food pretty much does it for me. Unfortunately; they don’t open on Saturday and Sunday and I work both of those days so I do miss them those 2 days.
As for the staffing at Café Voila, there are 3 young ladies that are always working there currently and they are the most pleasant and sweet young ladies I know. They’re consistently friendly; helpful and nice to everyone that comes in the Café and they always work extremely well as a team. The ladies remind me of their owners Tamara Kay and Jonathan Goodrow who are just as nice and pleasant.
Café Voila just recently celebrated their 10^th Anniversary being in business and I truly believe the secret of their success are good employees, good foods and loyal customers. Café Voila also owns a very successful Catering business calls Voila Catering and my family and coworker had a chance to sample some of their exotic and delicious dishes at their Anniversary Party. One thing that I respect the most about Café Voila is that they donate their leftover food from each week to a charity organization which serves food to the homeless people every Sunday at the park next to their business in downtown Portland. There are lots of things that are great about Café Voila at 901 SW Washington and I encourage all of you to come in and check them out. You will not be disappointed I promise!

try the soup

I’ve ate here 4X now. The sandwiches are fine, but that’s pretty much the extent of it. There is nothing great about them nor really bad about them. Very run of the mill. I’ve also had the daily specials a couple times, and I’m sorry to say that previous statement holds true to my prior comment. Stopped in today (Cinco de Mayo) b/​c they have ceviche and I’m feeling particularly festive in a Mexican kinda way. Their ceviche is terrible, but at least they tried.
1. They fried their own tortillas to make chips, but it’s über obvious the oil wasn’t hot enough and the tostada is chewy, rubbery, and super oily.
2. Bay Shrimp — now this is somewhat my fault b/​c I didn’t know a bay shrimp was, but these things are microscopic. They are about the size of my pinkie fingernail.
3. The salad below was missing any kind of vinegar or lime, inf fact the entire dish didn’t even taste like lime when it’s ceviche… really odd.
I work close to this place and I don’t know why I keep going back, but for some reason I do. I guess there is a time and a place for mediocrity, and that place is Café Voila. I wouldn’t recommend.

Dropped in to chat with a business partner and discovered a fantastic restaurant when all I was anticipating was a coffee shop. This is my new go-​to place in downtown Portland. The cider was great and the food (I did not eat) looked great. They do not use any processed food, a big plus. In addition, the service was very cheerful, professional, and personable. I’ll be back for a snack or more.

This place is a hidden gem in downtown Portland. It is also my favorite restaurant now!
This is legit gourmet food for rock bottom prices. The staff is BEYOND friendly and I can’t help but have a more enjoyable experience because of them. The location — top freaking notch. Each week the chefs post a special menu for the week with delicious, unique entrees for under $ 9. UNDER $ 9 FOR GOURMET FOOD. I died and went to heaven at this place. They also have a standard menu for you to enjoy that’s filled with deliciousness.
Do yourself a favor — try this place. Skip the food carts for a day and try this place. You’ll see that you might end up having a new favorite restaurant like me!

Lovely food, lovely people. For the quality of the food you get, it’s surprisingly cheap. I always feel so well fed when I go to Café Voila, in every sense :-)

My roomie has been talking this place up for weeks now, and I finally joined him for lunch the other day. Mmmm!!! This place has amazing sandwiches, soups, cooookies and other delicious delectables. Andy’s chicken sandwich was soooo tasty. Ray’s cinnamon chocolate cookie was the perfect in-​between soft and crispy cookie. I would even dare to call it «pillowy.» The chowder was good too. I can’t wait to go back and try this place again and again.

I love this place. Every time I come to Portland, I skip the food carts to have a place to sit down at Voila. This time it was the lasagna and blackberry salad. Really delicious, lovely food. Nice staff.

I’ve never come here because I’m always pulled in by the food carts right across the street. However after getting a recommendation from my coworker I decided to give this place a shot. The one thing food carts lack: healthy, delicious options. This place is awesome and CHEAP! I got an amazing salad — Red Quinoa and Brown Rice Salad– Healthy Grains, Kale, and Dried Cranberries dressed in our Scallion Vinaigrette vg, df, gf It was delicious, filling, and less than $ 5! I’ll definitely be back to try more.

Café Voila is a gem. I’m not usually an active reviewer on Unilocal,but having read the negative reviews of this wonderful little café, I was moved to action. Café Voila is absolutely consistent — consistently fresh and delicious food, consistently friendly staff, consistently inexpensive treats. I just discovered the place a few months ago. Since then, I have eaten here for lunch at least twice a week. During the summer, I always got a salad. They have about 6 large, healthy, and creative salads on the menu, packed up and ready to go. They are ridiculously cheap for the quality — ranging from $ 6 to $ 7. In an instant, the staff will toss the salad with as much of the dressing as you want, have it back in its container and delivered to you with a side of bread. Eventually, i gave in to longing for the other delicious-​looking treats behind the display case, and have had the lasagne, egg-​white feta and spinach fritatta, and some of the poached egg on biscuit concoctions. Delicious. (My one critique is that they microwaved the biscuits to eat them up — they dont have an oven.) You can tell they were a catering company, because food is prepared as though each bite is an individual event. As the weather gets colder, I have indulged in the soups and hot entrees. I have not been disappointed. The food carts across the street may offer more exotic fare and giant proportions, if thats what you are looking for. Café Voila is the better choice for healthy, fresh, and high-​quality.

Spendy but good

The bottom line for Café Voila is they are not consistently good. Every once in awhile you catch them on a good day and the food and staff are ‘on’. But today I paid $ 6 for a tiny scoop of salad and a scoop of soup. Tasted good, but the portion was outlandishly small considering what the carts are offering across the street for the same price. Also the soup claimed to have sausage, but my cup did not. The food may be decent and occasionally inventive but leaving a meal hungry is highly undesirable. I won’t be going back.

I wish this place were open on the weekends. What is up with Downtown Portland turning into a ghost town the minute the clock strikes 5 pm on Friday? Anyway, Café Voila offers truly inspired baked goods. Rosemary apricot jam scones, cardamon ginger shortbread, lemon curd ricotta bars… I just wish they’d bring back the chocolate cinnamon cookies, which are possibly some of the best cookies I’ve ever eaten. They are not too sweet, and loaded with dark chocolate flavor.
Café Voila also offers a hot daily lunch special as well as different soups, salads, and sandwiches. Today they had a duck gumbo with hush puppies and rice with fried basil leaves. Not to use this word again, but I guess I will… I think this place has an inspired chef.

When I went it was a Wednesday afternoon (2−5pm), so it was empty, which was what I was looking for as the couple of coffee shops and café I walked by earlier were packed and I needed to do some work…
I ordered a café americano and the girl instinctively asked me for how many shots, which was a good sign. She was nice and the coffee was great. I even ordered a small Mediterranean egg white frittata and it was also pretty good (bordering ok).
My problem with this place, and ultimately why it is only 2 stars is because 1) they do not have a bathroom, and instead they offer you a code to input into the security door on the other side of the building (outside around the corner) for the bathroom of some other office building. 2) The girl working there was cleaning (mopping, spraying windex and other disinfectants, etc) while I was there the whole time, which meant that She was spraying cleaners all over the machine that made my café americano, as well as slushing her mop around my table as my food and coffee and other belongings were out in the open. That led me to smell something on the border of a blend between ammonium and cat litter the whole time I was there.
I would give it 1 star but instead has 3 because it has a great location (right across from a whole plaza of street food), and a lot of people constantly walked in and ordered cookies and other sweet pastries to go, which I did not so I assume that’s where they shine (the pastries… to go).

I work down the street, and I get lunch from Voila all the time. It’s fast, there are healthy things on the menu, the prices are comparable to food carts, and I don’t have to stand in the rain while I wait for my food. I usually get one of their entrée salads for $ 6.50. The ambiance is blah, but for a take-​out meal (which you will eat at your desk because your life is sad and boring like mine), it’s totally adequate. I’m surprised that a few other reviewers have had bad experiences with the staff, because they’ve always been really nice to me and even remember my name (because I guess I go there a lot?). I do believe that there’s one server who puts on a fake British accent, but that would be my only complaint about the staff. (Or maybe the accent is not fake, in which case, oops?)

Voila is great. Its fairly nondescript exterior doesn’t do justice to the deliciousness inside. I especially recommend their delicious soups and salads. I eat a Voila soup at least once a week, usually twice. You can sign up for their mailing list and receive a weekly email detailing their offerings that week. For a downtown worker, this makes for a very convenient way to know what’s there before you go.
I also love the fact that it is so seasonal. There are a lot of good restaurants and carts downtown, but none at this price and convenience and quality that is so beautifully and magically seasonal!

got the turkey sandwich with brie and rosemary mayo. it was fairly plain. I know brie can be pretty mild, but I couldn’t even tell it was on the sandwich. The mayo was okay. rosemary is an interesting choice for an herbed mayonnaise, but the mayo shouldn’t have been the best thing about a sandwich if ya ask me.
Also got a side salad of the bulgar wheat with dried cranberries. it was pretty plain, as well.
my sister was very unhappy with her tuna and lentil side salad. the tuna was no different than what you can make at home and the lentils had a bit too much dill. normally «too much dill» would never come out of my mouth, but it was really the only discernable flavor in the whole salad.
I did not enjoy the attitude coming from the staff, either. I felt like they could not wait for me to get the heck out of there! Apparently it was just aimed at me and my sis, because they were incredibly pleasant to the next person, but I think they knew her… I was treated as if I was a huge bother and couldn’t I just hurry the eff up! it took me no more than 3 minutes to decide on a sandwich and salad and was then told (rather rudely) that I couldn’t order my coffee from this wait person, that I’d have to do that around the tiny counter with the other woman. When I tried to add on some dessert after ordering my coffee, I was told «can you just wait until I’ve started this!» (the coffee) and then she turned away from me abruptly.
The first girl then came over to the register to help the person behind me and seemed perturbed that the second girl had already plugged my total into the register but had not taken my card yet. I tried to hand her my card but she was too busy rolling her eyes for benefit of the new customer. I also had to remind them that I had asked for a dessert to go and it had neither been given to me nor added to my tab. Another eye roll from #1.
My sister and I sat down to eat and #2 kept coming over to «clean» the unused tables around us. Not sure if she was just eavesdropping or trying to make us so uncomfortable that we would go as quickly as possible. They weren’t even close to closing and there were other people in the place, so that wasn’t it.
I will not go back. It was a completely ridiculous experience and the food was so mediocre that there is absolutely no reason to ever visit again.