How Green Is Our Valley

   It is more than a wee bit ironic to me that St. Patrick’s Day, which honors a saint, is the most hell-raising holiday on the calendar. The Spokane Valley, a family- orientated place if ever there were one, will be stage to a scene replicated in every town of any size across the nation.

Amazingly, St. Patrick’s Day is a two-part party on every year that it does not fall on a Saturday or Sunday. The St. Patrick’s Day parade is always held on the Saturday before the holiday and it is also a day when the top o’ the morn will be toasted to with a good stiff drink by many who imbibe. For most it is the only day of the year for such day-long shenanigans and that is why when the holiday falls the next day on Sunday it is barely celebrated since so many revelers are still suffering.

On years like this, however, when the holiday falls on a weekday, St. Patrick’s Day will be a two-day celebration. There is ample time between Saturday and Tuesday for all but the feeblest to recuperate and then recharge for the St. Paddy party part two.

With my finger on the pulse and plenty of opinions on the matter of Spokane Valley wining and dining, I can offer a few tipsy tips for them that tip their glasses and some tasty tips for the hungry and sober but fun-loving folk.

A crowd will be forming at eight in the morning at the Trent N Dale Pub as the early birds begin to gather for the establishment’s annual pre-parade breakfast. The Trent N Dale, located at Tent and Dale, serves as the Valley’s rabbit hole to the downtown revelry which features a parade for the young kids and a full-town, day-long pub crawl for the older kids.

For $30.00 the TND offers a buffet style breakfast, commemorative tee shirt and a round trip bus ride hither and yon twixt their parking lot and the corner of Division and Main, which is a fair walk to the parade route but right smack dab in the middle of the crawl.

With the first bus leaving for town at 10 and the parade starting two hours later, it is likely that several of the unseasoned would not make it to the parade even if it ran right past on Division. If they did, they would be seeing two parades by that time.

For those wanting to whet their whistles at a festive Valley site, O’ Doherty’s Irish Pub and BBQ will be a spot of gold on Saturday from morning to midnight. Several times during the day, the Spokane County Fire Fighter’s Pipe and Drum group will be blowing and tapping the roof off with their bagpipes and snare drums. They play about 10 minutes and are as inspiring as they are loud.

O’ Doherty’s is our version of the Irish pub, a global phenomenon which numbers 1,694 in America, 861 in Ireland, 100 in Asia, 18 in the Middle East and 11 in Africa, according to Irishabroad.com. Though Ireland would only be the 23^rd largest if it were one of our fifty states, this leprechaun-sized country’s drinking establishments apparently set the bar for bars globally.

Our Irish pub was Porky’s Barbeque when Terry and Renee Best took over several years ago. With that business in the pits they teamed up with the downtown O’Doherty’s and transformed it into an Irish pub with southern style barbeque and traditional Irish vittles, drinks and decor.

Personally, I never have strayed from their savory barbeque until writing this story. I tried an item on their menu called the Butte Pasty, a lunch meal that Irish wives in Butte, Montana, lovingly prepared for their hard-working miner husbands. Why so many Irish migrated to Butte and how they came up with this scrumptious ethnic beef brisket delicacy, covered in rich brown gravy, I was not able to clearly Google.

The robust atmosphere at O’Doherty’s on Saturday will treble if not quadruple on Tuesday, the day a clock on the wall has been counting down to by the tenth of a second since last St. Patrick’s Day.

If you can’t get a seat there, and do not want to stand like many will, ride on down the road to the Iron Horse. This horse of many colors celebrates all holidays with flair and once again starting on Saturday the 14th it will be so green it should be temporarily renamed the Irish Horse.

The best answer, however, to the question “how green is our Valley?” is Conley’s Place, the local icon amongst independent restaurants. The owners, Jennifer and Ed Conley have been jauntily dancing to the tune of their own Irish jig since 1992 when they bought the Pioneer Pies restaurant that Jennifer had been managing for seven years.

Like the Bests at O’Doherty’s, the Conley’s reinvented their place and took up the Irish flag while keeping a delicious remnant of the old business, which in their case was the Pioneer Pies actual Pioneer Pies’ pies which sell like hot cakes by the slice or by the pie.

While it is a comfortable, fun and tasty place to dine all year, during March it looms above the rest like the jolly green giant of the Valley dishing out tasty Irish niblets all month long from a special St. Patrick’s menu featuring all the traditional Emerald Isle staples like pork chops, baked salmon and corned beef made with Conley’s private recipes and personal care.

As in years past, the month-long celebration reaches a lofty false summit on parade day with live entertainment by The Crooked Kilt Ensemble and Irish Dancers starting at 5:30 and then peaks on Tuesday the 17^th when they return and get things rolling at 4:30 in the afternoon.

At Conley’s Place that day it will be a gaily Gaelic scene running simultaneously at thousands of venues across Spokane and the Northwest, and across North America and apparently across the globe. There really is no other holiday of the year quite like it with so much global goodwill and good cheers, which befits a holiday honoring a saint.

Their Irish flags will proudly be displayed on St. Patrick’s day, on this day however, they were not so much.

This Butte Patsy I had at O’Doherty’s  did a lot more for my tastebuds than it did my eyes. While this plain little dish looks  part callizone and part burrito, it ate like a savory beef brisket pot pie.

When the timer on the wall hits zero hour, O’Doherty’s expldes.

Breakfast at Conley’s Place in Spokane Valley

Conley’s Place is one of those rare Spokane Valley restaurants: it is an independent and it has been around for more than 20 years if my guess is correct. Anyway, it seems like at least 20 years  since it was Pioneers Pies, which was a relatively short-lived endeavor compared to Conley’s which came after it  and the A&W Rootbeer stand which went before it.

That is where my sister got her first job running out burgers and root beer on those old trays that hooked on the windows of the driver’s door of the cars parked under the awning like they do now at Sonics for nostalgia. That was back around 1974 and the place was a bit of a relic back then. Between Conley’s tenure and the history of the building, when you eat at this setting, you are eating at a place that Valley diners have been going to for decades.

Conley’s was long established before the power house chains like Applebee’s and Marie Calender arrived in the Valley to instant success. Conley’s has years on the slew of Valley Mall eateries like the Red Robin and Boston’s and Outback Jack’s. Time and heritage is one thing Conley’s has on these high-profile, big name restaurants. Family operated is  another advantage none of the big boys can ever match Conley’s on.

Breakfast is perhaps Conley’s biggest leg up on the corporate competition. Partly because most of them do not serve breakfast, but mostly because those places that do cannot come close to Conley’s cozy comfort cuisine. They have a menu with such a wide array of choices that Denny’s, IHOP and Shari’s would have to join forces to come up with half of the original dishes that Conley’s offers.

I took my daughter there a few weeks ago, (breakfast is every kid’s favorite meal out) and the choices were so vast that we took nearly till lunch to decide what we wanted for breakfast. I finally decided to try their interesting dish that sounded like a  delectable version of biscuits and gravy where they put eggs and bacon on top of the biscuits and under the gravy. My daughter had to try their stuffed croissants even though all my kids always go with French Toast.

I have a feeling that we could have gone with anything on the menu and we would have been happy as clams, it all sounded so good. I know for sure that our choices turned out to be as good as they sounded on the menu. You got to love a place where the food is as good or better than the menu promises. The corporate breakfast places not only have overly enthusiastic descriptions of their selections on the menu, they also employ magical photographers to illustrate them.  I would encourage everyone to be independent minded and try breakfast at Conley’s where their menu actually under promises and their cooks over deliver.

<a href=”http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/291/1252894/restaurant/Spokane/Conleys-Place-Restaurant-Spokane-Valley”><img alt=”Conley’s Place Restaurant on Urbanspoon” src=”http://www.urbanspoon.com/b/link/1252894/minilink.gif” style=”border:none;width:130px;height:36px” /></a>