Bun Rieu at Pho An Sandy
Whether you want to avoid seeing people making googly eyes and kissie faces at each other while you try to eat or whether you just want to avoid paying double for a meal served by a frazzled waiter, here are 10 options to escape the trappings of dining out on Valentine’s Day. They’re un-hip and non-trendy. And most are inexpensive and casual, too. Also, because most of these places are rarely slammed, it’s a good list to keep around for a Friday or Saturday night when waiting 45 minutes for a table sounds especially miserable.
Version 2.0 of Extramsg.com’s dining guide and tip sheet for the Portland metro area is finally finished. You can visit it here or by clicking the link at the left under Portland Food News.
The tip sheet has been greatly overhauled. Categories, such as Indian and Sushi/Japanese have been added, but also many of the entries in each category have been updated or completely changed. There’s also a new listing of “Quick Picks” by neighborhood in descending order by price.
Hopefully this tip sheet will help visitors and new residents of Portland — or those looking to expand their culinary horizons. If you would like to criticize or comment on the tip sheet, please follow the link in the dining guide itself.
English Bay Beach on a sunny Sunday.
When I was young, I spent ten days every summer with SALTS sailing through the Georgia Straits. It was like camp on the water. I enjoyed it and looked forward to it every year. It imprinted a love of British Columbia, of Victoria, and of Vancouver. I’d come back from my trip saying “eh” out of habit and “aboot” out of affectation.
These last two food trips to Vancouver have done the same. I’m eager to return. I wish I had the money and time to explore more, to try everything at the night markets, to do a dim sum crawl, to eat everything on Vij’s menu, to dine at Lumiere, to spend time in Victoria and travel the island, etc, etc. I will get back. Until then, I’ll just keep telling all my food friends to make the five hour trip. It’s worth it.
The bustling Richmond Night Market.
Our second full day in Vancouver was set aside mostly for sight-seeing, but somehow (I blame myself) turned into a day of eating to rival the previous day’s adventures. The only place we knew we wanted to go was a nice, four-star restaurant for dinner. Portland doesn’t have any. Other than that, we had nothing planned.
Portland is a lovely town. The city itself is nearly as large as San Francisco, Seattle, or Vancouver, its sisters on the Pacific which all share a certain character. But unlike these cities it doesn’t actually sit on the ocean. It is not a tourist city in the same way these are. Its metropolis is not quite the draw of these. It maintains a small town feel that these don’t, really, which has its advantages and disadvantages.
One advantage is traffic. I would much rather drive through Portland, especially during the busy summer season, than any of these cities. Try coming across the bridge through Stanley Park from North Vancouver at sunset. Ugh. There are also very few restaurants in Portland where you have to wait or worry about a reservation.
But tourist dollars and business dollars often make for good high-end dining options. And like Seattle and San Fracisco, Vancouver has several restaurants that rival the best of the best in the States.
The lamb “popsicles” from Vij’s.
Salad bowl, melting pot — whatever food-related metaphor you want to use, Vancouver is it. Holding a strong kinship with the UK and the Continent, there are, of course, numerous English, Scottish, Irish, French, Germans, and other Europeans. But over a third of Vancouver’s population is Asian. Most of these are Chinese and Indian.
Driving the streets from one part of town to the next, for long stretches — up Granville, down Main, across Robson, name another and it will probably be true — there seem to be nothing but Asian restaurants. And that’s not even including the transplanted Asian suburb of Richmond, where we stayed, that I’ll touch on in a future report.
It was so terrific to see so many mixed-race couples. I wondered if the only non-mixed-race couples were tourists. I imagine this has something to do with the proliferation of great Asian restaurants in the city. When you have Chinese girlfriends taking their Scottish boyfriends to dim sum, or Japanese husbands taking their English wives to a ramen house, or Indian mothers cooking curries for their French-Canadian son-in-laws, the expectations, the knowledge, the passion for great Asian food will flourish. It helps, too, that Vancouver is right on the Pacific Ocean with a bounty of seafood.
The exchange of culinary traditions must work both ways because there certainly were more than round eyes and white faces ordering fish and chips, Belgian waffles, and stinky dairy products.
Clockwise from top left: Desserts at Pix; Margherita from Apizza Scholls; Cherries and blackberries from the Portland Farmer’s Market; Burger and fries from Cafe Castagna.
Version 1.0 of Extramsg.com’s dining guide and tip sheet for the Portland metro area is finally finished. You can visit it here or in the future by clicking the link at the left under Portland Food News.
The tip sheet suggests quality restaurants in a variety of categories and cuisines, plus places to shop for food. Following these recommendations are a list of dining options on Sundays and Mondays, links to online discussions of Portland eateries, and other dining guides. Finally, there is a list of over-rated restaurants to avoid.
Hopefully this tip sheet will help visitors and new residents of Portland — or those looking to expand their culinary horizons. If you would like to criticize or comment on the tip sheet, please follow the link in the dining guide itself.
It’s Chinatown.
For months my brothers, 10 and 13, who live in California had been anxiously waiting for school to end. I like to think their eagerness was to visit me. I had been anxiously trying to think of how I could entertain them for two weeks. The PS2 would only last so long. We had made trips up and down the Oregon coast, to Seattle, to the Cascades, to the Gorge, and all around Portland and its limited kid-oriented activities.
Two Christmas’s ago, I flew down there and we made a trip to Disneyland, San Diego, and Tijuana. My brothers loved the idea that they were going to a foreign country. So what about Canada? I thought. It’s almost another country.
I’ve wanted to visit Granville Public Market and had heard tale of the Asian culinary riches available in our northern neighbor. I have friends that visit the area twice a year just to eat dim sum. I know people who swear the best Indian food in North America is in Vancouver.
My youngest brother developed walking pneumonia quickly after arriving in Portland. As a result, we would only have the last three days of the trip to visit Canada. That meant only about 24 hours of actual Vancouver exploration. So off we went. I think we packed in a lot of food in those 24 hours.
