THE DALLES — To make Yelp’s Top 100 restaurants of 2022 is a big deal. With millions of visitors each year from around the globe, the website, which primarily hosts crowd-source reviews about businesses, has a big voice in the world of food and business.
So for The Dalles’ own The Riv Cafe to not only make the Top 100, but to be the number 10 spot, the 10th best restaurant in the country… well, that’s virtually in a league of its own. Not to mention, the listing even got them a mention on Forbes.
Noah Blakely, owner of The Riv since 2017, said the listing came as a huge surprise. They didn’t find out until late January that they had been voted onto the list, Blakely said, but even then he hadn’t realized what a big deal it was.
“When I saw that Forbes had mentioned us, I was like, ‘There is no freaking way,’” Blakely said.
Before Blakely purchased the cafe in 2017, it was Riverenza Espresso Bar and Cafe, owned by Molly Ott. Though Blakely had lived in The Dalles previously, even graduating from The Dalles High School, he had moved to San Francisco, where he had met his wife. When they found out they were pregnant, they had to figure out what to do next.
“I was in two full-time colleges, and a full-time teacher, and a volunteer youth pastor, just to make ends meet,” Blakely said. “And it did not work in San Francisco. So we were like ‘Well, where can we go?’”
When they got the opportunity to purchase The Riv, in the form of a phone call from a friend, it almost seemed like a sign, Blakely said.
“We thought about it. We prayed about it,” he said. “I mean, it’s a church. So it kind of felt like the Grace of God.”
After purchasing the Riverenza, they did make some changes, including to the name. Blakely said his biggest goal was to incorporate The Dalles as much as possible.
“We took over in October of 2017 with the vision in mind to just kind of capture the raw beauty of the Dalles,” he said. “We wanted to play off of things like nature, the river and trees, and kind of bring those elements inside the restaurant as well.”
Blakely said they approached that in a few different ways. He said he built the tables by hand using real wood. They also roast their own coffee, and everything’s from scratch, using family recipes.
“How we got our start was just to feed off of the excellence of the area to kind of honor The Dalles,” he said.
The Riv is located in the old Church of Christ building at 401 E. Street. They are currently open seven days a week, as of April 3, from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m.
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