85°C: Hokkaido chiffon at Washington Square

We are not going to pretend 85°C Bakery Cafe is a Portland neighborhood bakery, because it is NOT! It is a Taiwanese chain on the first level of Washington Square in Tigard, at 9753 SW Washington Square Road, the first Oregon shop the brand opened back in late 2019, and you will drive for it. That is fine. Some of the best bakery days in this metro are not on Division. They are a tray in a mall and a bag that steams up the car on the way home, and once we did this ritual we understood why people keep telling us to go.

If you have never done an 85°C, the walk is the whole experience, and we were grinning the entire time. You take a tray. You walk the case. You load it yourself. Staff wrap at the register. The breads are baked in the shop, in hourly waves, and the case is the opposite of a six-item artisan board: more than fifty pastries on a good visit, sweet and savory stacked in that bright, slightly chaotic way that makes you take three extra buns you did not plan. We can also see the chiffon cups sitting in their little paper collars, pale vanilla and pink strawberry, looking like they might be air, next to garlic cheese bread that is golden and shiny and honestly a little dangerous. The name is a coffee temperature — 85° Celsius, the brew point founder Cheng-Hsueh Wu liked — but we are here for the chiffon, and then we stay for everything else!

This is not a quiet counter. Weekend afternoons can stack a line that snakes toward the mall corridor, and the room is bright and clean in that mall-cafe way, fluorescent and busy, with people hovering over the racks waiting for the next bake to land. The line moves. We do not fight it. We use the wait to decide the tray, because once you are at the register you will not remember the second swirl cake. Hours run later than most Portland bakeries — weekdays and Saturday into the evening, Sunday a little shorter — so this is a mall cafe, not a 2 p.m. sell-out window, and that later clock is a HUGE part of why we keep driving.

Hokkaido chiffon FIRST. Vanilla chiffon, cream, strawberry — a cup that looks like it might collapse and then does not, light and milky and almost cloud-like, which is why we put two on the tray before we talked ourselves out of it. The Hokkaido tart is the custard cousin we add if the chiffon is already spoken for. Garlic cheese bread is the savory we will not skip; it is the item people who “don’t need anything else” still put down, warm and pull-apart, and we get why it shows up in almost every recap of this shop. Pork sung bun if you want the Taiwanese bakery classic — sweet-savory floss in a soft bun that looks humble and then is not. Matcha red bean swirl if you want the tea-and-bean lane that this chain does better than any croissant shop on 23rd, green and speckled and a little bittersweet.

Then stop. Or don’t! The tray is designed to make you greedy, and that is allowed. We usually cap it at five items plus a drink. The house coffee move is the sea salt coffee: a sweetened Americano with a thick sea salt cream cap that looks like a dessert sitting on a drink. We split one. It is a LOT of cream, and skipping it on a first visit feels like only buying a cookie. Cakes travel. If you are already in a mall parking structure, a whole cake for later is not a worse idea than another pastry you will eat in the car.

This is Tigard. Budget the drive and the mall parking, not a bike lock on a neighborhood meter. Grab a tray at the front. Do not wait to be seated like a restaurant. If a bun looks pale or tired, skip it; the next bake is the point of the hourly system, and we have watched staff restock warm trays while the line is still moving. We do not compare this to a naturally leavened SE loaf. Soft bread, chiffon, a savory bun you will think about on I-5 — worth the drive, and we keep making it!

More on the bakery: 85°C Bakery Cafe