Pizza in the oven at Depokos

Food carts, of course, are the awesome right now, and nowhere moreso than Portland where we have a higher number per capita than any other city in the country. Fine with me. When I travel I eat on the street more than in restaurants.

However, a cart with a wood-burning or gas oven running at 800 degrees slinging out freshly made pizzas with ingredients like fresh mozz and doughs allowed to ferment for 24 hours? Now that’s the real awesome. And Portland has three of them: Pizza Depokos, Pyro Pizza, and Wy’East Pizza. While I had tried two — Pyro and Wy’East — with the opening of the third, Depokos, a crawl was in order to judge their relative merits. The obvious partner in pizza-gorging to invite was Adam Lindsley.

I was one of the few stalwart fans of Lucier, perhaps the only real attempt in the last decade at creating a destination restaurant with luxurious food in a luxurious setting in Portland. My meals were always good with moments of brilliance. But the soulless monstrosity meme was established before the restaurant had even opened. I believe that largely colored the opinions of many of those I otherwise respect on culinary matters.

However, two people from the kitchen seemed to get uniform praise: Kristen Murray, the pastry chef, and Gregory Denton, the sous chef. Kristen Murray has since returned to her former employers’ other restaurant, Fenouil, while Gregory Denton helms Metrovino, possibly the most under-appreciated fine dining restaurant in Portland right now. Metrovino is housed in the former space of another (formerly) under-appreciated restaurant, DF. (You’d think that Lovejoy had a moat filled with alligators or something, given Portlanders’ unwillingness to consider the second half of the alphabet truly part of the Pearl. Just because it’s on the other side of the tracks, doesn’t mean it’s the other side of the tracks.) The food at Metrovino fits the Portland aesthetic well, much better than Lucier did, probably. It’s more restrained with technology and technique, plus there’s a stronger emphasis on renewing old world foods and methods. Expect things like sweetbreads, marrow bones, house-cured meats, house-cured fishes, and tripe to make frequent appearances on the menu.

So when I saw there was a goat dinner with Gabe Rucker splitting chefly duties, I knew that I’d be scraping together the cash and getting on bended knee to beg my wife for permission to go. Ironically, while I love what both Rucker and Denton do with less-used cuts of meat and offal, these two also gave me two of my best meals in my month long vegan quest. But I had no doubt they’d do even better with goat and I wasn’t disappointed.

A selection of truffles and caramels from Alma Chocolates

Five years ago I did a two part survey of every shop selling chocolates in the Portland area. Part 1 focused on national or international chocolatiers: Godiva, Moonstruck, See’s, Teuscher, and Verdun. Part 2 focused on local chocolatiers: Euphoria, Guanaja, Jaciva’s, Michelle’s, Pix, Sahagun, and Van Duyn. During the following year, there were enough quality local chocolatiers to emerge that another survey was in order, this one covering Alma Chocolates, Art of Chocolate, Depaula Chocolates, Hot Chefs, Pix, Sahagun, Wingnut, and Vosges. (Vosges being a highly-lauded national chocolatier used as a comparison.) I’m happy to say that the best have not only survived, but flourished. Pix, Sahagun, and Alma Chocolates have all received notoriety locally and beyond. Wingnut and Depaula both sell their chocolates directly and through popular local stores, such as Cacao.

But since the last survey — and especially in the last year — there’s been another explosion of local chocolatiers. A new head-to-head tasting is in order. In this report, I’ll focus on truffles from six chocolatiers: Cocoa Velvet, Couronne Chocolate, Ladybug Chocolates, Missionary Chocolates, Northwest Sweets, and Xocolatl de David. I’ll also look at the bars produced by Cocanu. (I tried to purchase truffles from Coco & Co, but my calls were not returned.) As a baseline, I bought a large selection of truffles and caramels from Sahagun and Alma Chocolates, my two favorite local chocolatiers that I believe are making chocolates as good as anything you can find outside of France.

Hopefully you’ll read this in time to spend your money wisely this Valentine’s Day. There are definitely some to seek out and some to avoid.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter or at PortlandFood.org, you probably already know that, yes, it’s true, I really am going vegan for a month. Why? Because?!?

Michael’s Beef & Sausage Combo — Wet

Perhaps Clint Eastwood’s sleeper Gran Torino was overlooked by the Oscars for non-PC exchanges like this:

Barber Martin: There. You finally look like a human being again. You shouldn’t wait so long between hair cuts, you cheap son of a bitch.

Walt Kowalski: Yeah. I’m surprised you’re still around. I was always hoping you’d die off and they got someone in here that knew what the hell they were doing. Instead, you’re just hanging around like the duop dego you are.
Barber Martin: That’ll be ten bucks, Walt.
Walt Kowalski: Ten bucks? Jesus Christ, Marty. What are you, half Jew or somethin’? You keep raising the damn prices all the time.
Barber Martin: It’s been ten bucks for the last five years, you hard-nosed pollock son of a bitch.
Walt Kowalski: Yeah, well keep the change.
Barber Martin: See you in three weeks, prick.
Walt Kowalski: Not if I see you first, dipshit.

PC or not, though, it has a certain authenticity. And I’ve lived it at Michael’s — just substitute the racial slurs for political rants.

Last time I was in, Michael saw one of his regulars sit down and he emerged from the kitchen to announce to the entire room that Obama was taking our country down the road of Nazi Germany. In between bites, the regular responded that Michael must have heard that from his buddy Rush Limbaugh while he was selling him oxycotin. Another customer across from me got up in disgust, moving to the other end of the restaurant. A lady from behind the counter came out to tell Michael to, “Shut up and go home,” while another customer started going off about how it was Bush who was the Nazi.

There was thumping of chests and busting of balls, but it was all for show. I’d heard about Michael’s rants, but never really seen one. I always assumed that he was a bit of an asshole, but worth putting up with for the food. Now I think it’s just a wonderful schtick from another place and another era — a welcome anachronism in a blue collar neighborhood undergoing a lot of change with the addition of Le Pigeon, Biwa, Simpatica, and Noble Rot.

And if you can’t handle the schtick, get the food to go, because they make some great sandwiches.

Grinder

Ed Levine, perhaps the foremost authority on pizza in the United States, likes to point out that pizza is really just bread, so you can’t have good pizza without good bread. The same certainly should be the case for sandwiches, which are just meat and cheese stuffed into bread. Thus, in looking for a good sandwich in Portland, the artisan bakeries deserve special focus.

In tasting sandwiches at all of Portland’s best bakeries, none better shines a light on the importance of good bread and the way that bread can give character to a sandwich than Little T. The fillings are fine, but the breads are the star of each sandwich.

Bunk’s Meatball Hero

“You can’t judge a book by its cover.”
~ 20th Century American Idiom

“Beauty … is but skin deep.”
~ Sir Thomas Overbury, 1613

“Food all looks the same coming out.”
~ Some Smart-Ass

Often suffused with smoke with a dinky storefront, there’s not much to draw you to or in Bunk Sandwiches except the line of people out front. Their sandwiches don’t often photograph well for whatever reason. Neither does my wife. But I don’t eat a photograph of a sandwich from Bunk anymore than I kiss a picture of my wife. The sandwiches may not be pretty, but they sure taste damned good. Thus, the line.

On the continuum of sandwiches from traditional to gourmet, Bunk’s give the impression of something traditional and comforting, yet the menu indicates, and the patient palate discovers, something creative and distinctive. But somehow, the flavors are never unexpected.

Yogyakarta street art

The weather got progressively cooler as I moved south from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur and finally to Yogyakarta, the medium-sized city of artists and students near many of Java’s most famous archeological sites. Each night along the main drag, the three-wheeled bicycle taxis of Indonesia lumbered in figure-eights while their drivers yelled out to potential customers by the name of their transport: “Becak, becak, becak.” Young kids and their friends on scooters zipped between the pedal-powered people movers, as if to thumb their nose at the 3rd world. Warungs — street stalls, most with open-sided canopies and blankets to sit on — would slowly emerge and illuminate, signs advertising nasi goreng, rendang, gulai nangka, and, of course, the favorite, ayam goreng. A mile of bubbling cauldrons and fragrant spices, each vendor imploring you to give them a try, insisting their makanan (food) is the best. Finally, Portland has a restaurant, Taste of Jakarta, that perfectly captures the flavors and style of these warungs.

Cafe Castagna’s Caesar

When I recently told a friend that I’d be renewing my caesar reports, revisiting places I had backlogged from when I started the surveys, they asked, “Why do you bother with such a boring dish?” For them, the reports I do on eyeball tacos and raw vegan lasagna are what they look forward to. For them, it’s more about entertainment than information.

Caesar salads are simple. They’re easy. They’re ubiquitous. Not that exciting, sure, but they are a great indicator of how committed a restaurant is to quality. There’s no excuse for a bad caesar.

Caesars are like a canary in the coal mine, for lack of a less tired metaphor. If a restaurant can’t prepare a balanced, uncooked dressing with only a few ingredients, what can you expect from a complex sauce? If a restaurant does something special with a common $9 salad, how much more will they do on a $30 dish with an exotic ingredient? If a restaurant gives you wilted, rotting greens, what is their fish like? In Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential he warns that if a restaurant can’t be bothered to keep their bathrooms clean — a place their customers will see and smell — they almost certainly won’t do better with their kitchen, an area generally hidden from their customers.

So, yeah, caesars aren’t the most exciting thing on the menu. But they taste good, many restaurants around town have them, and they’re a cheap way to compare what’s coming out of Portland kitchens.

For this report, I’ve included five restaurants: Alameda Brewhouse, Basta’s Trattoria, Cafe Castagna, the Heathman, and Ken’s Place. While Ken’s Place is closed, I decided to include it anyway, which I explain below. One of these salads has changed over the years, was one of the best in town before, and has possibly even improved. So click on…

Rushing to a business meeting Saturday, my wife called me to say that her brother would be coming over that evening with his family for dinner. She wanted to know if I wanted to cook or if we should just order pizza. We live in Vancouver, so “ordering pizza” means something like Bellagios — or at best — Pizzicato. Blech.

Normally the choice would be easy: I’d cook. Despite all the restaurant reports on this site, I usually cook much more than I eat out. But my wife’s brother and his family are vegans — people who don’t just believe meat is murder, but those who stand up for the rights of cows, chickens, and bees to be released from their indentured servitude. Green beans without bacon is a disappointment. But green beans without butter is a damned shame.

I told my wife I’d have to think about it. Could I get excited about cooking a vegan dinner? My friend, Scott, has been surveying vegetarian fine dining in Dallas. He calls the restaurant ahead to give them an opportunity to prepare something, assuming they don’t have vegetarian options on their menu (which is usually the case in Dallas). I’ve wondered what I could come up with on such short notice. Also, I’d eaten at Nutshell recently and had my complaints without having much firsthand knowledge of the demands of vegan cooking.

I decided to take on the vegan meal as a challenge. I called my wife after my meeting and told her I’d do it. I’d only have about four hours until they arrived to do my shopping and prepare the meal. I decided on four courses, and here were the results:

Chilled poblano-avocado soup. The roasted peppers added a modest amount of depth to the dish, plus a bit of spiciness, which was mitigated to a large extent by the richness of the avocado. The avocado also provided the elusive creaminess so difficult to achieve in most vegan dishes. Crostini kept the texture from becoming tiresome. A nice chunky salsa, perhaps made of diced tropical fruits and onion might have been a good contrasting bright flavor.

Heirloom tomato and bread salad. Fairly classic and straightforward, this was really all about the wonderful bread from Pearl Bakery and the terrific seasonal heirloom tomatoes from New Seasons. After that, it was just a matter of trying to enhance, but not overwhelm, the flavors with a simple vinaigrette, capers, olives, basil, and nuts. The lucques were a good choice because they’re more sweet than briney in contrast to the capers. This was tied for favorite dish along with the next one.

Vegetable terrine. The zucchini, onion, and potato create a mild base flavor for the corn puree, which is sweet, garlicky, and rich. This came out very subtle, but balanced. The peppery fruitiness of the olive oil rounded out the more direct sweetness of the corn and the caramelly sweetness of the garlic. I’m torn on whether this would have been improved with something tart like a drizzle of reduced balsamic.

Watermelon-peach soup. I like very few vegan pastries, so this allowed for an uncompromising vegan dessert. It was also a light, refreshing end to the meal. The plucot makes for a tart accent against the mellow soup. I had planned on serving it with some Valrhona manjari chocolate, a nice fruity dark chocolate from Madagascar. However, our guests brought vegan brownies and they worked well with the dish. The brownies were a little oily and gooey, but had a great flavor.

Photos and recipes follow.