Bun Bo Hue Minh's fabulous $7 bowl of bun rieu
Willamette Week’s annual Cheap Eats issue came out yesterday. Despite a couple restaurants that I’d really like to see dropped from the list (cough…cough….Laughing Planet), it’s a very good list overall. If you want to browse the choices quickly before digging into the reviews, I’ve distilled them at Portlandfood.org.
Included in the issue was a fun listing of bites, snacks, and entire meals $7 or under. Following are 10 additions to the list — some of my favorites — from a whole new set of shops, some of which weren’t covered in the issue at all.
The best gelato in town from Via Delizia
Last year, I went to Pix’s Ice Cream social and called it Part 1 of a Portland ice cream survey. There hasn’t been a part 2 until now. Why? Because I went to half a dozen ice cream shops claiming they made sundaes, banana splits, and so on, places like the now defunct Scooter’s, and left largely discouraged. If Cold Stone Creamery was better than all but one or two, why bother. Basically, I decided that your best bet in Portland for ice cream is to eat Italy’s version, gelato.
With the promise of more mid-80s weather this week, I thought I would finally get off my “a” and complete a gelato report I’ve been working on for some time. There are nine gelaterias in Portland Metro that I know of and I’ve tried them all several times. Recently, I hit six of them in one day and two others a day before and a day after so that I could more accurately judge them against each other. It wasn’t until recently that I learned of a ninth and visited that (further putting this report on hold).
The main things I look for in gelatos are natural, intense, clean flavors and smooth textures. Sorbettos should be intense without being overly sweet. The texture should be neither overly gummy or icy. Prior to the head-to-head tasting, I thought the distinctions between the different local sources were subtle, but I was surprised how much variation there actually is.
Note: I know it’s supposed to be gelati and sorbetti, but I prefer the Americanization for the plural. So there. 
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.
God, I love dairy foods. I’ve always hated the filmy coating milk puts in my mouth and I stopped drinking it when I was about five and discovered a big black fly floating halfway up a tall glass of the white liquid. But cheese, yogurt, butter, and ice cream — drool… I went through a period in my life where I couldn’t handle acids. Soda, orange juice, chiles, and anything with lactic acid, especially melted cheese and ice cream, put the GI into fits. Of those, cheese and ice cream were what I missed most. When I went on my original diet and lost over 100 lbs, I probably went a year without eating either.
That’s all behind me now, and just to prove it, I went to lactose intolerant hell Saturday, the American Cheese Society’s Festival of Cheese, and then followed that up with the 3rd Annual Pix Ice Cream Social. I love you dairy foods. You weren’t mad at me for leaving you, were you? Quiet now, I won’t leave you again. That’s a good cheddar. Mmmmm. That’s right, ice cream, nothing can keep us apart now…
Some readers are under the impression that I eat out for every meal. Not true. Not true at all. In fact, I cook more meals than I eat out. I cook two meals nearly every day for my wife. I make most of her lunches, which we freeze and she takes to work, plus I make most of her dinners. I also usually make one meal a day for myself (rarely the same as what I make for my wife).
However, I rarely write about the food I make. I would occasionally do a write-up on eGullet when I was active there. I even taught a cooking class through them. I am considering a cooking blog in the future, but for now I thought I’d go ahead and write up this one meal since I went through the trouble of taking pictures. I’ll return to dining reports soon. I promise.
A little background: over the past several years I’ve tried to make a special holiday meal. I’ve made a Mexican themed Christmas dinner for my dad’s family, including dishes like chiles en nogada stuffed with smoked turkey and dried cranberry picadillo. I made a huge tasting menu for my wife’s family that included oddities like parmesan ice cream.
This year, I wanted to take classic holiday dishes and put a spin on them either in form or flavor. The dinner took four hours with two days of prep for eight courses serving nine people. I didn’t sleep but one hour the night before and yet got much less done than hoped.
Few of the courses came out as I planned, and fewer courses came out than planned. But it was good experience for me and pushed my cooking skills.
You can find the full-sized images here.
The view of Vancouver’s skyline and Canada Place from Stanley Park.
My visit to Vancouver, BC, in June with my brothers was really just a scouting mission. My wife’s birthday would be coming up in early August and I wanted to take her somewhere interesting that we could manage in a long weekend. I also didn’t want to have to max out the credit cards in the process. We’d done Seattle and Oregon’s coast and high desert, so why not go a couple more hours to the Great White North, eh, and enjoy a beneficial exchange rate and a longer day in a massively multi-cultural city?
So we Hotwired a hotel, bought Best Places, printed out Daddy-A’s foodblog, and jumped in the car. We’d get one meal in Seattle on the way up, and one on the way down. Leaving on a Thursday and coming back on a Sunday, that’d give us two full days of gnoshing, plus two more meals. In the process, we’d have Malaysian twice, dim sum, of course, gelato, four star tasting menus, nibbling at a cheeseshop, a patisserie, a public market, a farmers market, and both the Chinatown and Richmond night markets, great fish and chips, and the best Indian food I’ve ever had.
This report will be broken up into four parts, separated by days, to make it easier to read.
How does one choose: freshly made churros with a chocolate shake or a mini-baked Alaska?
Every summer, Portland food-lovers with a sweet tooth lament the lack of an old-fashioned ice cream parlor. The death of Farrell’s was the death of not only an institution, but a way of enjoying ice cream. Sure, gelato is great, but it ain’t American. We’re a country that takes pride in our excess.
We have excess land, excess money, excess egos, and we want excess in our food, too. How else do you explain the bacon cheese burger? A meat with 20% fat wasn’t enough, so someone increased the chances of heart disease with some pork and dairy fat as well. And we love it! How else do you explain Chicago’s deep dish pizza, Utah’s pastrami burger, Philadelphia’s cheese steak, or the Coney Island chili dog? How else do you explain Lockhart, Texas? How else do you explain the $9.95 prime rib buffet? I’ve got two words for you: Supersize me.
Simple, uncluttered flavors — the hallmark of gelato — are for the Italians. The banana split, two slices of sweet fruit on either side of three scoops of differing ice cream topped with three different sauces, all covered in nuts, pineapple, whipped cream, and cherries — that’s American!
Over the next few weeks, I hope to visit any vestiges of ice cream parlors left in Portland metro and report back. But for now, I begin my American ice cream search with the 2nd annual Pix Ice Cream Social.
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.
Yes, all these people are in line for sausage.
The Beaverton Farmers Market claims to be the largest in the Northwest. It’s probably true. There seem to be slightly more vendors than at the Portland Farmers Market. But as McDonald’s proves every day, quantity does not imply quality.
Like the suburb it inhabits, the Beaverton Farmers Market suffers (slightly) from chains, of a sort. Most of the produce vendors — Deep Roots, Spring Hill, Rossi Farms, etc — can be found at the other Portland area farmers markets. However, they do have a couple unique seafood vendors, several interesting and exclusive prepared foods vendors, and the largest selection of nurseries.
Following are some of the highlights from the opening day.
