Rimsky-Korsakoffee House

Rimsky-Korsakoffee House has poured coffee and served dessert since 1980 from the front rooms of a 1902 Craftsman house at 707 Southeast 12th Avenue, in Portland's Buckman neighbourhood. Goody Cable opened it after years of classical-music parties in her own living room, and told the Portland Business Journal in 2001 that the reason was domestic: “I opened the coffeehouse to stop cleaning my house for music parties.” Asked in the same interview about buying a sign, she answered “Never”, and the building still carries none. Every table is named for a composer and several of them move: Willamette Week listed “animated furniture and an under-the-sea bathroom” among the attractions in 2006, and Eater Portland described “the craftsman-turned-cafe with the moving tables” in 2020. The ghosts arrived alongside the machinery. A server of twelve years, Mikey See, told Eyes + Edge in 2012 that “the original owner comes by regularly (even after death)”, while the one historian to name the household, Michael Munk, records the address as “the home of the Eva and Norma Graves”.

The house at 707 Southeast 12th Avenue, on the corner of Southeast Alder Street in Portland's Buckman neighbourhood, was built in 1902 and spent most of its first eighty years as somebody's home. One text names the household. Writing about how John Reed and Louise Bryant came to meet, the Portland historian Michael Munk records that the biographer Mary Dearborn “uncritically insists they met in 1914, relying on Ms. Brownell Frasier's account that they were formally introduced at the home of the Eva and Norma Graves, which still stands at 707 SE 12th Avenue.” Munk rejects the claim, and points out that Bryant's first biographer, Virginia Gardner, quotes the same informant differently: “It was at Clara Wold's house that Miss Frasier poured tea when Louise met John Reed.” He set out the documentary case at length in Oregon Historical Quarterly in 2008, in an article titled “Oregon Voices: The Romance of John Reed and Louise Bryant: New Documents Clarify How They Met.” What survives his argument is the address and the names Eva and Norma Graves. Munk does not say how the two women were related, or whether they were the first owners. Goody Cable opened the coffeehouse in the front rooms in 1980. She had been holding classical-music parties in her own house for years, and the business began as a way out of the housework. “I opened the coffeehouse to stop cleaning my house for music parties,” she told Gail Dana of the Portland Business Journal in a profile published on 18 November 2001; three small children had made the parties impractical, since “with three little kids, it was just too hard to do that.” Dana describes the plan Cable had in mind: a homelike restaurant where people would drink dark brews, eat cake and listen to Beethoven sonatas or Stravinsky discords. The menu would carry neither tuna sandwiches nor milk nor liquor, and the building would show “no sign indicating anyone was at a place of business.” The sign never came. Asked in 2001 whether buying one was negotiable, Cable answered “Never.” In the same interview she gave the address as Southeast 12th and Alder, said she had put 150,000 miles on her car commuting between the coffeehouse and the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, which she had rebuilt with her childhood friend Sallie Ford, and reported holding exactly one staff meeting in twenty-one years: “I'd never do that again. Too many people had ideas.” Accounting went to people who enjoyed it more than she did, which Dana notes “includes everyone.” Mikey See, a server who arrived around 2000, gave the Portland magazine Eyes + Edge a shorter version of the same arrangement in an interview published on 7 August 2012: “We have no manager (We have no manager).” Asked who had decorated the place, he answered that Cable “has the primary say but we all have pretty much added our own touches over the years,” that a colleague named Gillian “has painted animals everywhere,” and that the house had been “sort of been a repository for all the employees unwanted items for the last 3 decades.” He also credited the kitchen's paintwork to “the many food fights.” Every table carries a composer's name, and some of them move. Willamette Week's capsule review, archived under the date 6 December 2006, put “animated furniture and an under-the-sea bathroom” among the reasons the house “screams 'only in Portland'”. Eyes + Edge called them “self-rotating tables” in 2012 and singled out the dessert named Rasputin's Vice. Blank journals lie around the rooms for guests to write in, and Vivian McInerny of The Oregonian, describing them on 15 November 2006, called them “kind of a low-tech MySpace or FaceBook.” Her piece was written to announce the fifth annual Riches at Rimsky's craft sale, held for one day only on Sunday 26 November 2006 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., with coffee and cookies thrown in. The pandemic nearly ended it. On 7 December 2020 Brooke Jackson-Glidden reported in Eater Portland that customers and staff were trying to raise 20,000 dollars to keep the cafe alive, after a year of “significant financial hardships”. The campaign page she quoted argued the case in the first person plural: “Rimsky's is more than just a business — for many of us, it's our second home. Portland wouldn't be the same without it, and neither would we.” At the time she filed, the total stood above 17,000 dollars.

Rimsky-Korsakoffee House stands at 707 Southeast 12th Avenue, Portland, Oregon 97214, at the corner of Southeast Alder Street. The telephone number The Oregonian printed on 15 November 2006, 503-232-2640, is the same one published today. There is no sign: the only marking on the building is the number 707 painted on the porch beam, visible in Visitor7's photograph of 7 November 2013, which also shows the house half-buried in the foliage that David Stabler and The Portland Mercury described as leaving it “nearly hidden from view”. Two listings consulted on 7 September 2026 disagree about the days. Portland Monthly gives “Sun - Thurs: 7pm - 12am Fri - Sat: 7pm - 1am” and characterises the house by “a 7 p.m. opening time, cash or check only, and not a laptop in sight”. The site at rimskykorsakoffeehouse.com gives “Wednesday – Sunday: 7:00 PM – Midnight”, “Closed Monday & Tuesday”, says cash and cards are both accepted, and bans laptops under the heading “No Wi-Fi”, explaining that “Rimsky's is for conversation, journaling, and dessert — not spreadsheets.” The provenance of that second site is discussed in the sceptical section. Both agree on a 7 p.m. opening and on the address, and the English Wikipedia infobox records that the house takes no reservations. The building is a private business inside a house rather than a museum, and it has the access limits of a dwelling built in 1902. A flight of stone-faced steps climbs to the porch in the 2013 photograph, fitted with a handrail and without a ramp. Eyes + Edge places the celebrated bathroom “on the upper level of the business”, reached by stairs and a creaky door, and its server warned in 2012 that “there's always a line.” Parking is on-street in a residential grid. The coffeehouse serves coffee and desserts only, among them the ice cream sundae called Rasputin's Vice.