Sweetpea: Portland's first all-vegan bakery, with doughnuts on Saturdays

Southeast Stark can feel like nothing more than a commute, but Sweetpea Baking Co. gives Saturdays a reason to slow down, because Saturday is always doughnut day there. The café is at 1205 Southeast Stark, and it's Portland's first all-vegan retail bakery (it started in 2005 and opened this café in 2008). It's roomy and serves cakes, bagels and tempeh-bacon breakfasts, and the Saturday doughnut is the headliner, while every Monday is Cronut day, which makes a fine excuse for a second visit.

Everything here is vegan, and the bakery is upfront that it isn't a gluten-free bakery. There are some wheat-free pastries in the case, but they won't make gluten-free special-order cakes or cupcakes.

It's a café where you sit down and eat. Regular hours are 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., seven days a week, and breakfast and lunch on the January 2026 food menu run until 2:45 p.m., so it's the place to go when you want a real meal. The Breakfast Sammie is tempeh bacon, tofu scramble, cashew cheese, spinach and mayo on grilled ciabatta, and the Portlander is a plate of waffle, scramble and tempeh bacon. There's an Untuna sandwich, a Reuben and a Sweetpea Club, plus Henry Higgins boiled bagels with Earth Balance, schmear, garden veggie, bacon scallion or cashew cheese. Everything on that menu is vegan. The heart marks mean wheat-free or can-be-wheat-free, which isn't the same as a dedicated gluten-free kitchen.

The cake list is long, with Mom's Cake, Black and White, Vanilla Cloud, Toasted Coconut, Chocolate Decadence, Tuxedo, Chocolate Peanut Butter, Chocolate Raspberry, Confetti, German Chocolate, Lemon Chiffon, Cookies and Cream, Red Velvet and Elvis, and the Oatmeal Spice and Carrot can't be made nut-free. The 9-inch cheesecakes come in New York style, chocolate, key lime, peanut butter chocolate chip, brownie chunk, marionberry, raspberry and turtle, and the pies are chocolate silk, fruit crumble, and lattice apple or cherry. Walk-in whole cakes are a limited selection of 6-inch and 9-inch, along with pastries. For a specific cake, call the bakery, since they take special orders by phone only (no internet, email or voicemail) and need seventy-two hours at minimum. They don't do stacked, shaped or fondant cakes, and they don't deliver special orders.

If you want a particular doughnut or pastry on a given day, call (503) 477-5916 first.

Regulars come back because everything in the place is vegan. Get the Saturday doughnut or the Monday cronut, and if the pastry is gone, settle in with a Breakfast Sammie. If you need a gluten-free cake for an occasion, you'll have to order it somewhere else, since Sweetpea won't make one.

The essentials live on the place page: Sweetpea Baking Co.