Beets with Blue Cheese Terrine
Apparently I’ve started a tradition. Clarklewis began my Dining Month Portland reports last year. I hadn’t realized it, but I hadn’t been in since. As with Tabla, it tends to be a place I think about when I think about pasta and I don’t think about pasta very often. But I could do a lot worse than returning to Clarklewis which has been a sold restaurant through multiple owners and multiple chefs.
Spanish Octopus with Tails and Trotters Pork
Dining Month Portland is back — now in its second year, a reincarnation of the 25 for $25 from a decade ago. Many of Portland’s best restaurants (and a few, frankly, that I wouldn’t even consider going to for free) offer three course meals for only $25. Last year, I went to five different spots during the first five days and I’ve decided to do that again this year, starting with Tabla.
I’ve always enjoyed Tabla. It’s one of Portland’s best values. I’d probably go more if I ate pasta more, but being on a perpetual low-carb diet — or at least telling myself I am until a delicious dessert gets plopped down in front of me (or until blackberry season) — usually precludes a visit. But I wanted to get back. Since Ten-01, its sister-restaurant closed, there’ve been some changes in staffing.
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.
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.
Skamania’s Polenta Cakes with Salmon
Perhaps in the future the Taste of the Nation will have a nap room, but until then pacing is important. With more restaurants than ever trying to woo new customers, the number of delectable dishes is far beyond the capacity of even a seasoned gorger like myself.
Intensely flavored dishes work better in the tasting format. They delight the tastebuds with minimal stomach space sacrificed. Dishes with too much subtlety don’t make an impression after one bite, nor can they compete with the palate saturation throughout the evening. For example, Paley’s had two enjoyable soups, one made with sorrel and one made with beets. But both were mildly flavored, making me think I would need an entire bowl to truly evaluate them.
However, you can pace yourself right out of some of the best dishes. Pix’s chocolates were gone within an hour of opening. Moments after receiving a recommendation for a cheese at Curds and Whey, the cheese ran out. By the time I took photographs of all the restaurants’ offerings and got back to Autentica’s table for green mole, it was gone, too.
My primary strategy, however, worked in general. Every time I met up with a friend, I asked for their favorites and then made a bee-line for that dish. I didn’t taste everything, but I tasted a lot. The following were my favorites. (Note that my photos turned out especially good this year, so I recommend looking through the album.)
Pizza A-Go-Go: Good taste, questionable crust
While New York is the first place that comes to mind when people think of pizza, it’s the midwest where proportionally most of the slices in this country are eaten and many of the national chains got their start. The burly folks of Ohio consume more pizza per capita than those from any other state. Pizza Hut was started in Kansas. Godfather’s was started in Nebraska. Dominos and Little Caesars were started in Michigan. Papa Johns was started in Indiana. (Most of the other chains come from California.)
In Portland, it’s this midwestern, homestyle pizza, as I think of it, that dominates. In this second installment of my pizza survey, all but one of the slice peddlers (Pizza A-Go-Go) has more in common with this “midwestern” style pizza than New York’s original. These other four — Hot Lips, Kustom, Oasis Cafe, and Tributes — range from good to mediocre to pretty damned bad.
American Dream
In college, pizza made up one of my four basic food groups, along with burritos, hamburgers, and ice cream. A job at Pizza Hut, “pizza pizza” from Little Caesar’s, the appropriately named 5 Buck Pizza — I gained over 100 lbs in college and it took several years before I got rid of it. Part of that was giving up pizza, a food, I realized, I ate more for its simplicity than its taste.
I’ve built up a very low tolerance for bad pizza. Domino’s, Papa John’s, Round Table? I’d rather not eat. It wasn’t until Apizza Scholls came along that my love for the flavored flatbread was renewed. Luckily, the lines out the door keep me from over-indulging.
But with this local gold standard and a new pack of pizzerias in town, I’ve decided it’s time to survey what’s out there. This first edition features six slice joints: American Dream, Bella Faccia, Escape from New York, New York New York, Rovente, and Stark Naked.
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.
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.
